Pediatric News

Telehealth use, although much higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic, accounted for less than 20% of weekly outpatient visits 6 months into the pandemic, according to a new report from the American Medical Association. Ten percent of weekly visits were conducted via videoconferencing, and 8.1% of visits were conducted using the telephone.

Those figures may overstate the true level of telehealth use in fall 2020. A study by the Commonwealth Fund, Harvard University, Boston, and Phreesia found that in December of that year, only 8% of outpatient visits involved the use of telemedicine – and that was up from 6% in October. In contrast to the AMA results, which came from its 2020 benchmark survey of physicians, the Commonwealth Fund study used data from practice management systems and an online patient registration platform, as well as electronic health record data.

A more recent survey of hospital executives found that as of September 2021, hospital telehealth visits had leveled off at 10% to 20% of appointments. Similarly, a McKinsey survey in July showed that telehealth encounters made up 13% to 17% of evaluation and management visits across all specialties.

RichLegg/E+

Big jump during pandemic

The AMA report offers a wealth of data on how physicians use telehealth and the differences between specialties in this area.

The report found that 70.3% of physicians worked in practices that used videoconferencing to provide patient visits in September 2020, compared to 14.3% of physicians in September 2018. Sixty-seven percent of physicians worked in practices that used telephone visits (the comparable figure for 2018 was unavailable).

Overall, 79% of physicians worked in a practice that used telehealth, compared to 25% in 2018.

Not every doctor in practices that utilized telehealth conducted virtual visits. In contrast to the 70.3% of doctors who were in practices that had video visits, only 59.1% of the respondents had personally conducted a videoconferencing visit in the previous week. The average numbers of weekly video and telephone visits per physician were 9.9 and 7.6, respectively, including those who did none.

There were big differences in virtual visit use among specialties as well. Eighty-five percent of psychiatrists were in practices that provided online appointments, according to the AMA survey, and three-quarters of primary care physicians said their practices offered telehealth appointments. Pediatricians were much less likely than family practice/general practice physicians (FPs/GPs) or general internists to do so.

The practices of many medical specialists were also highly likely to provide telehealth. Over 75% of practices in cardiology, endocrinology/diabetes, gastroenterology, nephrology, and neurology offered telehealth visits. About 88% of hematologists/oncologists offered video visits. Far fewer surgeons reported that their practice used virtual visits; the exceptions were urologists and dermatologists, 87% of whose practices used telehealth.
 

How telehealth was used

Across all specialties, 58% of physicians said clinicians in their practices used it to diagnose or treat patients; 59.2%, to manage patients with chronic disease; 50.4%, to provide acute care; and 34.3%, to provide preventive care.

Seventy-two percent of FP/GP and pediatric practices used telehealth to diagnose or treat patients. Just 64.9% of internists said their practices did so, and only 61.9% of them said their practices provided acute care via telehealth, versus 70% of FPs/GPs and pediatricians.

Among medical specialties, endocrinologists/diabetes physicians were those most likely to report the practice-level use of telehealth to diagnose or treat patients (71.9%), manage patients with chronic disease (92.1%), and provide preventive care (52.6%).

Significantly, 33% of medical specialists said their practices used remote patient monitoring. This finding was driven by high rates of use among cardiology practices (63.3%) and endocrinology practices (41.6%). Overall, the practice-level use of remote patient monitoring rose from 10.4% of practices in 2018 to 19.9% in 2020.
 

Virtual consults with peers

Some practices used telehealth to enable physicians to consult with colleagues. Twelve percent of respondents said their practices used telehealth to seek a second opinion from a health care professional in 2020, compared to 6.9% in 2018. Formal consultations via telehealth were also increasingly common: 17.2% of doctors said their practices did this in 2020, compared to 11.3% in 2018.

Also of note, 22.4% of physicians said their practices used telehealth for after-hours care or night calls in 2020, versus 9.9% in 2018.

The AMA report credited telehealth and expanded coverage and payment rules for enabling physician practices to keep their revenue streams positive and their practices open. However, the Commonwealth Fund study found “a substantial cumulative reduction in visits across all specialties over the course of the pandemic in 2020.” These ranged from a drop of 27% in pediatric visits to a decline of 8% in rheumatology visits during the period from March to December 2020.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Telehealth use, although much higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic, accounted for less than 20% of weekly outpatient visits 6 months into the pandemic, according to a new report from the American Medical Association. Ten percent of weekly visits were conducted via videoconferencing, and 8.1% of visits were conducted using the telephone.

Those figures may overstate the true level of telehealth use in fall 2020. A study by the Commonwealth Fund, Harvard University, Boston, and Phreesia found that in December of that year, only 8% of outpatient visits involved the use of telemedicine – and that was up from 6% in October. In contrast to the AMA results, which came from its 2020 benchmark survey of physicians, the Commonwealth Fund study used data from practice management systems and an online patient registration platform, as well as electronic health record data.

A more recent survey of hospital executives found that as of September 2021, hospital telehealth visits had leveled off at 10% to 20% of appointments. Similarly, a McKinsey survey in July showed that telehealth encounters made up 13% to 17% of evaluation and management visits across all specialties.

RichLegg/E+

Big jump during pandemic

The AMA report offers a wealth of data on how physicians use telehealth and the differences between specialties in this area.

The report found that 70.3% of physicians worked in practices that used videoconferencing to provide patient visits in September 2020, compared to 14.3% of physicians in September 2018. Sixty-seven percent of physicians worked in practices that used telephone visits (the comparable figure for 2018 was unavailable).

Overall, 79% of physicians worked in a practice that used telehealth, compared to 25% in 2018.

Not every doctor in practices that utilized telehealth conducted virtual visits. In contrast to the 70.3% of doctors who were in practices that had video visits, only 59.1% of the respondents had personally conducted a videoconferencing visit in the previous week. The average numbers of weekly video and telephone visits per physician were 9.9 and 7.6, respectively, including those who did none.

There were big differences in virtual visit use among specialties as well. Eighty-five percent of psychiatrists were in practices that provided online appointments, according to the AMA survey, and three-quarters of primary care physicians said their practices offered telehealth appointments. Pediatricians were much less likely than family practice/general practice physicians (FPs/GPs) or general internists to do so.

The practices of many medical specialists were also highly likely to provide telehealth. Over 75% of practices in cardiology, endocrinology/diabetes, gastroenterology, nephrology, and neurology offered telehealth visits. About 88% of hematologists/oncologists offered video visits. Far fewer surgeons reported that their practice used virtual visits; the exceptions were urologists and dermatologists, 87% of whose practices used telehealth.
 

How telehealth was used

Across all specialties, 58% of physicians said clinicians in their practices used it to diagnose or treat patients; 59.2%, to manage patients with chronic disease; 50.4%, to provide acute care; and 34.3%, to provide preventive care.

Seventy-two percent of FP/GP and pediatric practices used telehealth to diagnose or treat patients. Just 64.9% of internists said their practices did so, and only 61.9% of them said their practices provided acute care via telehealth, versus 70% of FPs/GPs and pediatricians.

Among medical specialties, endocrinologists/diabetes physicians were those most likely to report the practice-level use of telehealth to diagnose or treat patients (71.9%), manage patients with chronic disease (92.1%), and provide preventive care (52.6%).

Significantly, 33% of medical specialists said their practices used remote patient monitoring. This finding was driven by high rates of use among cardiology practices (63.3%) and endocrinology practices (41.6%). Overall, the practice-level use of remote patient monitoring rose from 10.4% of practices in 2018 to 19.9% in 2020.
 

Virtual consults with peers

Some practices used telehealth to enable physicians to consult with colleagues. Twelve percent of respondents said their practices used telehealth to seek a second opinion from a health care professional in 2020, compared to 6.9% in 2018. Formal consultations via telehealth were also increasingly common: 17.2% of doctors said their practices did this in 2020, compared to 11.3% in 2018.

Also of note, 22.4% of physicians said their practices used telehealth for after-hours care or night calls in 2020, versus 9.9% in 2018.

The AMA report credited telehealth and expanded coverage and payment rules for enabling physician practices to keep their revenue streams positive and their practices open. However, the Commonwealth Fund study found “a substantial cumulative reduction in visits across all specialties over the course of the pandemic in 2020.” These ranged from a drop of 27% in pediatric visits to a decline of 8% in rheumatology visits during the period from March to December 2020.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Telehealth use, although much higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic, accounted for less than 20% of weekly outpatient visits 6 months into the pandemic, according to a new report from the American Medical Association. Ten percent of weekly visits were conducted via videoconferencing, and 8.1% of visits were conducted using the telephone.

Those figures may overstate the true level of telehealth use in fall 2020. A study by the Commonwealth Fund, Harvard University, Boston, and Phreesia found that in December of that year, only 8% of outpatient visits involved the use of telemedicine – and that was up from 6% in October. In contrast to the AMA results, which came from its 2020 benchmark survey of physicians, the Commonwealth Fund study used data from practice management systems and an online patient registration platform, as well as electronic health record data.

A more recent survey of hospital executives found that as of September 2021, hospital telehealth visits had leveled off at 10% to 20% of appointments. Similarly, a McKinsey survey in July showed that telehealth encounters made up 13% to 17% of evaluation and management visits across all specialties.

RichLegg/E+

Big jump during pandemic

The AMA report offers a wealth of data on how physicians use telehealth and the differences between specialties in this area.

The report found that 70.3% of physicians worked in practices that used videoconferencing to provide patient visits in September 2020, compared to 14.3% of physicians in September 2018. Sixty-seven percent of physicians worked in practices that used telephone visits (the comparable figure for 2018 was unavailable).

Overall, 79% of physicians worked in a practice that used telehealth, compared to 25% in 2018.

Not every doctor in practices that utilized telehealth conducted virtual visits. In contrast to the 70.3% of doctors who were in practices that had video visits, only 59.1% of the respondents had personally conducted a videoconferencing visit in the previous week. The average numbers of weekly video and telephone visits per physician were 9.9 and 7.6, respectively, including those who did none.

There were big differences in virtual visit use among specialties as well. Eighty-five percent of psychiatrists were in practices that provided online appointments, according to the AMA survey, and three-quarters of primary care physicians said their practices offered telehealth appointments. Pediatricians were much less likely than family practice/general practice physicians (FPs/GPs) or general internists to do so.

The practices of many medical specialists were also highly likely to provide telehealth. Over 75% of practices in cardiology, endocrinology/diabetes, gastroenterology, nephrology, and neurology offered telehealth visits. About 88% of hematologists/oncologists offered video visits. Far fewer surgeons reported that their practice used virtual visits; the exceptions were urologists and dermatologists, 87% of whose practices used telehealth.
 

How telehealth was used

Across all specialties, 58% of physicians said clinicians in their practices used it to diagnose or treat patients; 59.2%, to manage patients with chronic disease; 50.4%, to provide acute care; and 34.3%, to provide preventive care.

Seventy-two percent of FP/GP and pediatric practices used telehealth to diagnose or treat patients. Just 64.9% of internists said their practices did so, and only 61.9% of them said their practices provided acute care via telehealth, versus 70% of FPs/GPs and pediatricians.

Among medical specialties, endocrinologists/diabetes physicians were those most likely to report the practice-level use of telehealth to diagnose or treat patients (71.9%), manage patients with chronic disease (92.1%), and provide preventive care (52.6%).

Significantly, 33% of medical specialists said their practices used remote patient monitoring. This finding was driven by high rates of use among cardiology practices (63.3%) and endocrinology practices (41.6%). Overall, the practice-level use of remote patient monitoring rose from 10.4% of practices in 2018 to 19.9% in 2020.
 

Virtual consults with peers

Some practices used telehealth to enable physicians to consult with colleagues. Twelve percent of respondents said their practices used telehealth to seek a second opinion from a health care professional in 2020, compared to 6.9% in 2018. Formal consultations via telehealth were also increasingly common: 17.2% of doctors said their practices did this in 2020, compared to 11.3% in 2018.

Also of note, 22.4% of physicians said their practices used telehealth for after-hours care or night calls in 2020, versus 9.9% in 2018.

The AMA report credited telehealth and expanded coverage and payment rules for enabling physician practices to keep their revenue streams positive and their practices open. However, the Commonwealth Fund study found “a substantial cumulative reduction in visits across all specialties over the course of the pandemic in 2020.” These ranged from a drop of 27% in pediatric visits to a decline of 8% in rheumatology visits during the period from March to December 2020.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

One week after reporting promising results from the trial of their COVID-19 vaccine in children ages 5-11, Pfizer and BioNTech announced they’d submitted the data to the Food and Drug Administration. But that hasn’t stopped some parents from discreetly getting their children under age 12 vaccinated.

“The FDA, you never want to get ahead of their judgment,” Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told MSNBC on Sept. 28. “But I would imagine in the next few weeks, they will examine that data and hopefully they’ll give the okay so that we can start vaccinating children, hopefully before the end of October.”
 

Lying to vaccinate now

More than half of all parents with children under 12 say they plan to get their kids vaccinated, according to a Gallup poll. Among those who say they’re “very worried” or “somewhat worried” about their children catching COVID, that number goes up to 90% and 72%, respectively.

And although the FDA and the American Academy of Pediatrics have warned against it, some parents whose children can pass for 12 have lied to get them vaccinated already.

Dawn G. is a mom of two in southwest Missouri, where less than 45% of the population has been fully vaccinated. Her son turns 12 in early October, but in-person school started in mid-August.

“It was scary, thinking of him going to school for even 2 months,” she said. “Some parents thought their kid had a low chance of getting COVID, and their kid died. Nobody expects it to be them.”

In July, she and her husband took their son to a walk-in clinic and lied about his age.

“So many things can happen, from bullying to school shootings, and now this added pandemic risk,” she said. “I’ll do anything I can to protect my child, and a birthdate seems so arbitrary. He’ll be 12 in a matter of weeks. It seems ridiculous that that date would stop me from protecting him.”

In northern California, Carrie S. had a similar thought. When the vaccine was authorized for children ages 12-15 in May, the older of her two children got the shot right away. But her youngest doesn’t turn 12 until November.

“We were tempted to get the younger one vaccinated in May, but it didn’t seem like a rush. We were willing to wait to get the dosage right,” she ssaid. “But as Delta came through, there were no options for online school, the CDC was dropping mask expectations –it seemed like the world was ready to forget the pandemic was happening. It seemed like the least-bad option to get her vaccinated so she could go back to school, and we could find some balance of risk in our lives.”
 

Adult vs. pediatric doses

For now, experts advise against getting younger children vaccinated, even those who are the size of an adult, because of the way the human immune system develops.

“It’s not really about size,” said Anne Liu, MD, an immunologist and pediatrics professor at Stanford (Calif.) University. “The immune system behaves differently at different ages. Younger kids tend to have a more exuberant innate immune system, which is the part of the immune system that senses danger, even before it has developed a memory response.”

The adult Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine contains 30 mcg of mRNA, while the pediatric dose is just 10 mcg. That smaller dose produces an immune response similar to what’s seen in adults who receive 30 mcg, according to Pfizer.

“We were one of the sites that was involved in the phase 1 trial, a lot of times that’s called a dose-finding trial,” said Michael Smith, MD, a coinvestigator for the COVID vaccine trials done at Duke University. “And basically, if younger kids got a higher dose, they had more of a reaction, so it hurt more. They had fever, they had more redness and swelling at the site of the injection, and they just felt lousy, more than at the lower doses.”

At this point, with Pfizer’s data showing that younger children need a smaller dose, it doesn’t make sense to lie about your child’s age, said Dr. Smith.

“If my two options were having my child get the infection versus getting the vaccine, I’d get the vaccine. But we’re a few weeks away from getting the lower dose approved in kids,” he said. “It’s certainly safer. I don’t expect major, lifelong side effects from the higher dose, but it’s going to hurt, your kid’s going to have a fever, they’re going to feel lousy for a couple days, and they just don’t need that much antigen.”

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

One week after reporting promising results from the trial of their COVID-19 vaccine in children ages 5-11, Pfizer and BioNTech announced they’d submitted the data to the Food and Drug Administration. But that hasn’t stopped some parents from discreetly getting their children under age 12 vaccinated.

“The FDA, you never want to get ahead of their judgment,” Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told MSNBC on Sept. 28. “But I would imagine in the next few weeks, they will examine that data and hopefully they’ll give the okay so that we can start vaccinating children, hopefully before the end of October.”
 

Lying to vaccinate now

More than half of all parents with children under 12 say they plan to get their kids vaccinated, according to a Gallup poll. Among those who say they’re “very worried” or “somewhat worried” about their children catching COVID, that number goes up to 90% and 72%, respectively.

And although the FDA and the American Academy of Pediatrics have warned against it, some parents whose children can pass for 12 have lied to get them vaccinated already.

Dawn G. is a mom of two in southwest Missouri, where less than 45% of the population has been fully vaccinated. Her son turns 12 in early October, but in-person school started in mid-August.

“It was scary, thinking of him going to school for even 2 months,” she said. “Some parents thought their kid had a low chance of getting COVID, and their kid died. Nobody expects it to be them.”

In July, she and her husband took their son to a walk-in clinic and lied about his age.

“So many things can happen, from bullying to school shootings, and now this added pandemic risk,” she said. “I’ll do anything I can to protect my child, and a birthdate seems so arbitrary. He’ll be 12 in a matter of weeks. It seems ridiculous that that date would stop me from protecting him.”

In northern California, Carrie S. had a similar thought. When the vaccine was authorized for children ages 12-15 in May, the older of her two children got the shot right away. But her youngest doesn’t turn 12 until November.

“We were tempted to get the younger one vaccinated in May, but it didn’t seem like a rush. We were willing to wait to get the dosage right,” she ssaid. “But as Delta came through, there were no options for online school, the CDC was dropping mask expectations –it seemed like the world was ready to forget the pandemic was happening. It seemed like the least-bad option to get her vaccinated so she could go back to school, and we could find some balance of risk in our lives.”
 

Adult vs. pediatric doses

For now, experts advise against getting younger children vaccinated, even those who are the size of an adult, because of the way the human immune system develops.

“It’s not really about size,” said Anne Liu, MD, an immunologist and pediatrics professor at Stanford (Calif.) University. “The immune system behaves differently at different ages. Younger kids tend to have a more exuberant innate immune system, which is the part of the immune system that senses danger, even before it has developed a memory response.”

The adult Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine contains 30 mcg of mRNA, while the pediatric dose is just 10 mcg. That smaller dose produces an immune response similar to what’s seen in adults who receive 30 mcg, according to Pfizer.

“We were one of the sites that was involved in the phase 1 trial, a lot of times that’s called a dose-finding trial,” said Michael Smith, MD, a coinvestigator for the COVID vaccine trials done at Duke University. “And basically, if younger kids got a higher dose, they had more of a reaction, so it hurt more. They had fever, they had more redness and swelling at the site of the injection, and they just felt lousy, more than at the lower doses.”

At this point, with Pfizer’s data showing that younger children need a smaller dose, it doesn’t make sense to lie about your child’s age, said Dr. Smith.

“If my two options were having my child get the infection versus getting the vaccine, I’d get the vaccine. But we’re a few weeks away from getting the lower dose approved in kids,” he said. “It’s certainly safer. I don’t expect major, lifelong side effects from the higher dose, but it’s going to hurt, your kid’s going to have a fever, they’re going to feel lousy for a couple days, and they just don’t need that much antigen.”

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

One week after reporting promising results from the trial of their COVID-19 vaccine in children ages 5-11, Pfizer and BioNTech announced they’d submitted the data to the Food and Drug Administration. But that hasn’t stopped some parents from discreetly getting their children under age 12 vaccinated.

“The FDA, you never want to get ahead of their judgment,” Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told MSNBC on Sept. 28. “But I would imagine in the next few weeks, they will examine that data and hopefully they’ll give the okay so that we can start vaccinating children, hopefully before the end of October.”
 

Lying to vaccinate now

More than half of all parents with children under 12 say they plan to get their kids vaccinated, according to a Gallup poll. Among those who say they’re “very worried” or “somewhat worried” about their children catching COVID, that number goes up to 90% and 72%, respectively.

And although the FDA and the American Academy of Pediatrics have warned against it, some parents whose children can pass for 12 have lied to get them vaccinated already.

Dawn G. is a mom of two in southwest Missouri, where less than 45% of the population has been fully vaccinated. Her son turns 12 in early October, but in-person school started in mid-August.

“It was scary, thinking of him going to school for even 2 months,” she said. “Some parents thought their kid had a low chance of getting COVID, and their kid died. Nobody expects it to be them.”

In July, she and her husband took their son to a walk-in clinic and lied about his age.

“So many things can happen, from bullying to school shootings, and now this added pandemic risk,” she said. “I’ll do anything I can to protect my child, and a birthdate seems so arbitrary. He’ll be 12 in a matter of weeks. It seems ridiculous that that date would stop me from protecting him.”

In northern California, Carrie S. had a similar thought. When the vaccine was authorized for children ages 12-15 in May, the older of her two children got the shot right away. But her youngest doesn’t turn 12 until November.

“We were tempted to get the younger one vaccinated in May, but it didn’t seem like a rush. We were willing to wait to get the dosage right,” she ssaid. “But as Delta came through, there were no options for online school, the CDC was dropping mask expectations –it seemed like the world was ready to forget the pandemic was happening. It seemed like the least-bad option to get her vaccinated so she could go back to school, and we could find some balance of risk in our lives.”
 

Adult vs. pediatric doses

For now, experts advise against getting younger children vaccinated, even those who are the size of an adult, because of the way the human immune system develops.

“It’s not really about size,” said Anne Liu, MD, an immunologist and pediatrics professor at Stanford (Calif.) University. “The immune system behaves differently at different ages. Younger kids tend to have a more exuberant innate immune system, which is the part of the immune system that senses danger, even before it has developed a memory response.”

The adult Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine contains 30 mcg of mRNA, while the pediatric dose is just 10 mcg. That smaller dose produces an immune response similar to what’s seen in adults who receive 30 mcg, according to Pfizer.

“We were one of the sites that was involved in the phase 1 trial, a lot of times that’s called a dose-finding trial,” said Michael Smith, MD, a coinvestigator for the COVID vaccine trials done at Duke University. “And basically, if younger kids got a higher dose, they had more of a reaction, so it hurt more. They had fever, they had more redness and swelling at the site of the injection, and they just felt lousy, more than at the lower doses.”

At this point, with Pfizer’s data showing that younger children need a smaller dose, it doesn’t make sense to lie about your child’s age, said Dr. Smith.

“If my two options were having my child get the infection versus getting the vaccine, I’d get the vaccine. But we’re a few weeks away from getting the lower dose approved in kids,” he said. “It’s certainly safer. I don’t expect major, lifelong side effects from the higher dose, but it’s going to hurt, your kid’s going to have a fever, they’re going to feel lousy for a couple days, and they just don’t need that much antigen.”

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

The number of physicians who have chosen early retirement or have left medicine because of the COVID-19 pandemic may be considerably lower than previously thought, results of a new study suggest.

The research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association, based on Medicare claims data, stated that “practice interruption rates were similar before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, except for a spike in April 2020.”

By contrast, in a Physicians Foundation Survey conducted in August 2020, 8% of physicians said they had closed their practices as a result of COVID, and 4% of the respondents said they planned to leave their practices within the next 12 months.

Similarly, a Jackson Physician Search survey in the fourth quarter of 2020 found that 54% of physicians surveyed had changed their employment plans. Of those doctors, 21% said they might hang up their white coat for early retirement. That works out to about 11% of the respondents.

The JAMA study’s authors analyzed the Medicare claims data from Jan. 1, 2019, to Dec. 30, 2020, to see how many physicians with Medicare patients had stopped filing claims for a period during those 2 years.

If a doctor had ceased submitting claims and then resumed filing them within 6 months after the last billing month, the lapse in filing was defined as “interruption with return.” If a physician stopped filing claims to Medicare and did not resume within 6 months, the gap in filing was called “interruption without return.”

In April 2020, 6.9% of physicians billing Medicare had a practice interruption, compared to 1.4% in 2019. But only 1.1% of physicians stopped practice in April 2020 and did not return, compared with 0.33% in 2019.

Physicians aged 55 or older had higher rates of interruption both with and without return than younger doctors did. The change in interruption rates for older doctors was 7.2% vs. 3.9% for younger physicians. The change in older physicians’ interruption-without-return rate was 1.3% vs. 0.34% for younger colleagues.

“Female physicians, specialists, physicians in smaller practices, those not in a health professional shortage area, and those practicing in a metropolitan area experienced greater increases in practice interruption rates in April 2020 vs. April 2019,” the study states. “But those groups typically had higher rates of return, so the overall changes in practice interruptions without return were similar across characteristics other than age.”
 

Significance for retirement rate

Discussing these results, the authors stressed that practice interruptions without return can’t necessarily be attributed to retirement, and that practice interruptions with return don’t necessarily signify that doctors had been furloughed from their practices.

Also, they said, “this measure of practice interruption likely misses meaningful interruptions that lasted for less than a month or did not involve complete cessation in treating Medicare patients.”

Nevertheless, “the study does capture a signal of some doctors probably retiring,” Jonathan Weiner, DPH, professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in an interview.

But he added, “Some of those people who interrupted their practices and didn’t return may still come back. And there are probably a lot of other doctors who are leaving or changing practices that they didn’t capture.” For example, it’s possible that some doctors who went to work for other health care organizations stopped billing under their own names.

In Dr. Weiner’s view, the true percentage of physicians who have retired since the start of the pandemic is probably somewhere between the portion of doctors who interrupted their practice without return, according to the JAMA study, and the percentage of physicians who said they had closed their practices in the Physicians Foundation survey.
 

No mass exodus seen

Michael Belkin, JD, divisional vice president of recruiting for Merritt Hawkins, a physician search firm, said in an interview that the real number may be closer to the interruption-without-return figure in the JAMA study.

While many physician practices were disrupted in spring of 2020, he said, “it really didn’t result in a mass exodus [from health care]. We’re not talking to a lot of candidates who retired or walked away from their practices. We are talking to candidates who slowed down last year and then realized that they wanted to get back into medicine. And now they’re actively looking.”

One change in job candidates’ attitude, Mr. Belkin said, is that, because of COVID-19–related burnout, their quality of life is more important to them.

“They want to know, ‘What’s the culture of the employer like? What did they do last year during COVID? How did they handle it? Have they put together any protocols for the next pandemic?’ “
 

Demand for doctors has returned

In the summer of 2020, there was a major drop in physician recruitment by hospitals and health systems, partly because of fewer patient visits and procedures. But demand for doctors has bounced back over the past year, Mr. Belkin noted. One reason is the pent-up need for care among patients who avoided health care providers in 2020.

Another reason is that some employed doctors – particularly older physicians – have slowed down. Many doctors prefer to work remotely 1 or 2 days a week, providing telehealth visits to patients. That has led to a loss of productivity in many health care organizations and, consequently, a need to hire additional physicians.

Nevertheless, not many doctors are heading for the exit earlier than physicians did before COVID-19.

“They may work reduced hours,” Mr. Belkin said. “But the sense from a physician’s perspective is that this is all they know. For them to walk away from their life in medicine, from who they are, is problematic. So they’re continuing to practice, but at a reduced capacity.”

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

The number of physicians who have chosen early retirement or have left medicine because of the COVID-19 pandemic may be considerably lower than previously thought, results of a new study suggest.

The research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association, based on Medicare claims data, stated that “practice interruption rates were similar before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, except for a spike in April 2020.”

By contrast, in a Physicians Foundation Survey conducted in August 2020, 8% of physicians said they had closed their practices as a result of COVID, and 4% of the respondents said they planned to leave their practices within the next 12 months.

Similarly, a Jackson Physician Search survey in the fourth quarter of 2020 found that 54% of physicians surveyed had changed their employment plans. Of those doctors, 21% said they might hang up their white coat for early retirement. That works out to about 11% of the respondents.

The JAMA study’s authors analyzed the Medicare claims data from Jan. 1, 2019, to Dec. 30, 2020, to see how many physicians with Medicare patients had stopped filing claims for a period during those 2 years.

If a doctor had ceased submitting claims and then resumed filing them within 6 months after the last billing month, the lapse in filing was defined as “interruption with return.” If a physician stopped filing claims to Medicare and did not resume within 6 months, the gap in filing was called “interruption without return.”

In April 2020, 6.9% of physicians billing Medicare had a practice interruption, compared to 1.4% in 2019. But only 1.1% of physicians stopped practice in April 2020 and did not return, compared with 0.33% in 2019.

Physicians aged 55 or older had higher rates of interruption both with and without return than younger doctors did. The change in interruption rates for older doctors was 7.2% vs. 3.9% for younger physicians. The change in older physicians’ interruption-without-return rate was 1.3% vs. 0.34% for younger colleagues.

“Female physicians, specialists, physicians in smaller practices, those not in a health professional shortage area, and those practicing in a metropolitan area experienced greater increases in practice interruption rates in April 2020 vs. April 2019,” the study states. “But those groups typically had higher rates of return, so the overall changes in practice interruptions without return were similar across characteristics other than age.”
 

Significance for retirement rate

Discussing these results, the authors stressed that practice interruptions without return can’t necessarily be attributed to retirement, and that practice interruptions with return don’t necessarily signify that doctors had been furloughed from their practices.

Also, they said, “this measure of practice interruption likely misses meaningful interruptions that lasted for less than a month or did not involve complete cessation in treating Medicare patients.”

Nevertheless, “the study does capture a signal of some doctors probably retiring,” Jonathan Weiner, DPH, professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in an interview.

But he added, “Some of those people who interrupted their practices and didn’t return may still come back. And there are probably a lot of other doctors who are leaving or changing practices that they didn’t capture.” For example, it’s possible that some doctors who went to work for other health care organizations stopped billing under their own names.

In Dr. Weiner’s view, the true percentage of physicians who have retired since the start of the pandemic is probably somewhere between the portion of doctors who interrupted their practice without return, according to the JAMA study, and the percentage of physicians who said they had closed their practices in the Physicians Foundation survey.
 

No mass exodus seen

Michael Belkin, JD, divisional vice president of recruiting for Merritt Hawkins, a physician search firm, said in an interview that the real number may be closer to the interruption-without-return figure in the JAMA study.

While many physician practices were disrupted in spring of 2020, he said, “it really didn’t result in a mass exodus [from health care]. We’re not talking to a lot of candidates who retired or walked away from their practices. We are talking to candidates who slowed down last year and then realized that they wanted to get back into medicine. And now they’re actively looking.”

One change in job candidates’ attitude, Mr. Belkin said, is that, because of COVID-19–related burnout, their quality of life is more important to them.

“They want to know, ‘What’s the culture of the employer like? What did they do last year during COVID? How did they handle it? Have they put together any protocols for the next pandemic?’ “
 

Demand for doctors has returned

In the summer of 2020, there was a major drop in physician recruitment by hospitals and health systems, partly because of fewer patient visits and procedures. But demand for doctors has bounced back over the past year, Mr. Belkin noted. One reason is the pent-up need for care among patients who avoided health care providers in 2020.

Another reason is that some employed doctors – particularly older physicians – have slowed down. Many doctors prefer to work remotely 1 or 2 days a week, providing telehealth visits to patients. That has led to a loss of productivity in many health care organizations and, consequently, a need to hire additional physicians.

Nevertheless, not many doctors are heading for the exit earlier than physicians did before COVID-19.

“They may work reduced hours,” Mr. Belkin said. “But the sense from a physician’s perspective is that this is all they know. For them to walk away from their life in medicine, from who they are, is problematic. So they’re continuing to practice, but at a reduced capacity.”

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

The number of physicians who have chosen early retirement or have left medicine because of the COVID-19 pandemic may be considerably lower than previously thought, results of a new study suggest.

The research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association, based on Medicare claims data, stated that “practice interruption rates were similar before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, except for a spike in April 2020.”

By contrast, in a Physicians Foundation Survey conducted in August 2020, 8% of physicians said they had closed their practices as a result of COVID, and 4% of the respondents said they planned to leave their practices within the next 12 months.

Similarly, a Jackson Physician Search survey in the fourth quarter of 2020 found that 54% of physicians surveyed had changed their employment plans. Of those doctors, 21% said they might hang up their white coat for early retirement. That works out to about 11% of the respondents.

The JAMA study’s authors analyzed the Medicare claims data from Jan. 1, 2019, to Dec. 30, 2020, to see how many physicians with Medicare patients had stopped filing claims for a period during those 2 years.

If a doctor had ceased submitting claims and then resumed filing them within 6 months after the last billing month, the lapse in filing was defined as “interruption with return.” If a physician stopped filing claims to Medicare and did not resume within 6 months, the gap in filing was called “interruption without return.”

In April 2020, 6.9% of physicians billing Medicare had a practice interruption, compared to 1.4% in 2019. But only 1.1% of physicians stopped practice in April 2020 and did not return, compared with 0.33% in 2019.

Physicians aged 55 or older had higher rates of interruption both with and without return than younger doctors did. The change in interruption rates for older doctors was 7.2% vs. 3.9% for younger physicians. The change in older physicians’ interruption-without-return rate was 1.3% vs. 0.34% for younger colleagues.

“Female physicians, specialists, physicians in smaller practices, those not in a health professional shortage area, and those practicing in a metropolitan area experienced greater increases in practice interruption rates in April 2020 vs. April 2019,” the study states. “But those groups typically had higher rates of return, so the overall changes in practice interruptions without return were similar across characteristics other than age.”
 

Significance for retirement rate

Discussing these results, the authors stressed that practice interruptions without return can’t necessarily be attributed to retirement, and that practice interruptions with return don’t necessarily signify that doctors had been furloughed from their practices.

Also, they said, “this measure of practice interruption likely misses meaningful interruptions that lasted for less than a month or did not involve complete cessation in treating Medicare patients.”

Nevertheless, “the study does capture a signal of some doctors probably retiring,” Jonathan Weiner, DPH, professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in an interview.

But he added, “Some of those people who interrupted their practices and didn’t return may still come back. And there are probably a lot of other doctors who are leaving or changing practices that they didn’t capture.” For example, it’s possible that some doctors who went to work for other health care organizations stopped billing under their own names.

In Dr. Weiner’s view, the true percentage of physicians who have retired since the start of the pandemic is probably somewhere between the portion of doctors who interrupted their practice without return, according to the JAMA study, and the percentage of physicians who said they had closed their practices in the Physicians Foundation survey.
 

No mass exodus seen

Michael Belkin, JD, divisional vice president of recruiting for Merritt Hawkins, a physician search firm, said in an interview that the real number may be closer to the interruption-without-return figure in the JAMA study.

While many physician practices were disrupted in spring of 2020, he said, “it really didn’t result in a mass exodus [from health care]. We’re not talking to a lot of candidates who retired or walked away from their practices. We are talking to candidates who slowed down last year and then realized that they wanted to get back into medicine. And now they’re actively looking.”

One change in job candidates’ attitude, Mr. Belkin said, is that, because of COVID-19–related burnout, their quality of life is more important to them.

“They want to know, ‘What’s the culture of the employer like? What did they do last year during COVID? How did they handle it? Have they put together any protocols for the next pandemic?’ “
 

Demand for doctors has returned

In the summer of 2020, there was a major drop in physician recruitment by hospitals and health systems, partly because of fewer patient visits and procedures. But demand for doctors has bounced back over the past year, Mr. Belkin noted. One reason is the pent-up need for care among patients who avoided health care providers in 2020.

Another reason is that some employed doctors – particularly older physicians – have slowed down. Many doctors prefer to work remotely 1 or 2 days a week, providing telehealth visits to patients. That has led to a loss of productivity in many health care organizations and, consequently, a need to hire additional physicians.

Nevertheless, not many doctors are heading for the exit earlier than physicians did before COVID-19.

“They may work reduced hours,” Mr. Belkin said. “But the sense from a physician’s perspective is that this is all they know. For them to walk away from their life in medicine, from who they are, is problematic. So they’re continuing to practice, but at a reduced capacity.”

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Paying people to participate in clinical trials remains controversial. But to date, most reservations are based on hypothetical scenarios or expert opinion with few real-world data to support them.

Research released this week could change that.

Investigators offered nearly 1,300 participants in two clinical trials either no payment or incentives up to $500 to partake in a smoking cessation study or an analysis of a behavioral intervention to increase ambulation in hospitalized patients.

More cash was associated with greater agreement to participate in the smoking cessation study but not the ambulation trial.

But the bigger news may be that offering payment did not appear to get people to accept more risks or skew participation to lower-income individuals, as some ethicists have warned.

“With the publication of our study, investigators finally have data that they can cite to put to rest any lingering concerns about offering moderate incentives in low-risk trials,” lead author Scott D. Halpern, MD, PhD, the John M. Eisenberg Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology, and Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, told this news organization.

This initial real-world data centers on low-risk interventions and more research is needed to analyze the ethics and effectiveness of paying people to join clinical trials with more inherent risk, the researchers note.

The study was published online Sept. 20 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
 

A good first step?

“Payments to research participants are notoriously controversial. Many people oppose payments altogether or insist on minimal payments out of concern that people might be unduly influenced to participate,” Ana S. Iltis, PhD, told this news organization when asked for comment. “Others worry that incentives will disproportionately motivate the less well-off to participate.” 

“This is an important study that begins to assess whether these concerns are justified in a real-world context,” added Dr. Iltis, director of the Center for Bioethics, Health and Society and professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.

In an accompanying invited commentary, Sang Ngo, Anthony S. Kim, MD, and Winston Chiong, MD, PhD, write: “This work is welcome, as it presents experimental data to a bioethical debate that so far has been largely driven by conjecture and competing suppositions.”

The commentary authors, however, question the conclusiveness of the findings. “Interpreting the authors’ findings is complex and illustrates some of the challenges inherent to applying empirical data to ethical problems,” they write.
 

Recruitment realities

When asked his advice for researchers considering financial incentives, Dr. Halpern said: “All researchers would happily include incentives in their trial budgets if not for concerns that the sponsor or institutional review board might not approve of them.”

“By far the biggest threat to a trial’s success is the inability to enroll enough participants,” he added.

Dr. Iltis agreed, framing the need to boost enrollment in ethical terms. “There is another important ethical issue that often gets ignored, and that is the issue of studies that fail to enroll enough participants and are never completed or are underpowered,” she said.

“These studies end up exposing people to research risks and burdens without a compensating social benefit.”

“If incentives help to increase enrollment and do not necessarily result in undue influence or unfair participant selection, then there might be ethical reasons to offer incentives,” Dr. Iltis added.

Building on previous work assessing financial incentives in hypothetical clinical trials, Dr. Halpern and colleagues studied 654 participants with major depressive disorder in a smoking cessation trial. They also studied another 642 participants in a study that compared a gamification strategy to usual care for encouraging hospitalized patients to get out of bed and walk.

Dr. Halpern and colleagues randomly assigned people in the smoking cessation study to receive no financial compensation, $200, or $500. In the ambulation trial, participants were randomly allocated to receive no compensation, $100, or $300.
 

Key findings

A total of 22% of those offered no incentive enrolled in the smoking cessation study. In contrast, 36% offered $200 agreed, as did 47% of those offered $500, which the investigators say supports offering cash incentives to boost enrollment. The differences were significant (P < .001).

In contrast, the amount offered did not significantly incentivize more people to participate in the ambulation trial (P = .62). Rates were 45% with no compensation, 48% with $100 payment, and 43% with $300 payment.

In an analysis that adjusted for demographic differences, financial well-being, and Research Attitudes Questionnaire (RAQ-7) scores, each increase in cash incentive increased the odds of enrollment in the smoking cessation trial by 70% (adjusted odds ratio, 1.70; 95% confidence interval, 1.34-2.17).

The same effect was not seen in the ambulation trial, where each higher cash incentive did not make a significant difference (aOR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.64-1.22).

“The ambulation trial was a lower-risk trial in which patients’ willingness to participate was higher in general. So there were likely fewer people whose participation decisions could be influenced by offers of money,” Dr. Halpern said.
 

Inducement vs. coercion

The incentives in the study “did not function as unjust inducements, as they were not preferentially motivating across groups with different income levels or financial well-being in either trial,” the researchers note.

Dr. Halpern and colleagues also checked for any perceptions of coercion. More than 70% of participants in each smoking cessation trial group perceived no coercion, as did more than 93% of participants in each ambulation trial group, according to scores on a modified Perceived Coercion Scale of the MacArthur Admission Experience Survey. 

Furthermore, perception of risks did not significantly alter the association between cash incentives and enrollment in either trial.

After collecting the findings, Dr. Halpern and colleagues informed participants about their participation in RETAIN and explained the rationale for using different cash incentives. They also let all participants know they would ultimately receive the maximum incentive – either $500 or $300, depending on the trial.
 

Research implications

A study limitation was reliance on participant risk perception, as was an inability to measure perceived coercion among people who chose not to participant in the trials. Another potential limitation is that “neither of these parent trials posed particularly high risks. Future tests of incentives of different sizes, and in the context of higher-risk parent trials, including trials that test treatments of serious illnesses, are warranted,” the researchers note.

“While there are many more questions to ask and contexts in which to study the effects of incentives, this study calls on opponents of incentivizing research participants with money to be more humble,” Dr. Iltis said. “Incentives might not have the effects they assume they have and which they have long held make such incentives unethical.”

“I encourage researchers who are offering incentives to consider working with people doing ethics research to assess the effects of incentives in their studies,” Dr. Halpern said. “Real-world, as opposed to hypothetical studies that can improve our understanding of the impact of incentives can improve the ethical conduct of research over time.”
 

Responding to criticism

The authors of the invited commentary questioned the definitions Dr. Halpern and colleagues used for undue or unjust inducement. “Among bioethicists, there is no consensus about what counts as undue inducement or an unjust distribution of research burdens. In this article, the authors have operationalized these constructs based on their own interpretations of undue and unjust inducement, which may not capture all the concerns that scholars have raised about inducement.”

Asked to respond to this and other criticisms raised in the commentary, Dr. Halpern said: “Did our study answer all possible questions about incentives? Absolutely not. But when it comes to incentives for research participation, an ounce of data is worth a pound of conjecture.”

There was agreement, however, that the findings could now put the onus on opponents of financial incentives for trial participants.

“I agree with the commentary’s authors that our study essentially shifts the burden of proof, such that, as they say, ‘those who would limit [incentives’] application may owe us an applicable criterion,’ ” Dr. Halpern said.  

The authors of the invited commentary also criticized use of the study’s noninferiority design to rule out undue or unjust inducement. They note this design “may be unfamiliar to many bioethicists and can place substantial evaluative demands on readers.”

“As for the authors’ claim that noninferiority designs are difficult to interpret and unfamiliar to most clinicians and ethicists, I certainly agree,” Dr. Halpern said. “But that is hardly a reason to not employ the most rigorous methods possible to answer important questions.”

The study was supported by funding from the National Cancer Institute.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Paying people to participate in clinical trials remains controversial. But to date, most reservations are based on hypothetical scenarios or expert opinion with few real-world data to support them.

Research released this week could change that.

Investigators offered nearly 1,300 participants in two clinical trials either no payment or incentives up to $500 to partake in a smoking cessation study or an analysis of a behavioral intervention to increase ambulation in hospitalized patients.

More cash was associated with greater agreement to participate in the smoking cessation study but not the ambulation trial.

But the bigger news may be that offering payment did not appear to get people to accept more risks or skew participation to lower-income individuals, as some ethicists have warned.

“With the publication of our study, investigators finally have data that they can cite to put to rest any lingering concerns about offering moderate incentives in low-risk trials,” lead author Scott D. Halpern, MD, PhD, the John M. Eisenberg Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology, and Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, told this news organization.

This initial real-world data centers on low-risk interventions and more research is needed to analyze the ethics and effectiveness of paying people to join clinical trials with more inherent risk, the researchers note.

The study was published online Sept. 20 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
 

A good first step?

“Payments to research participants are notoriously controversial. Many people oppose payments altogether or insist on minimal payments out of concern that people might be unduly influenced to participate,” Ana S. Iltis, PhD, told this news organization when asked for comment. “Others worry that incentives will disproportionately motivate the less well-off to participate.” 

“This is an important study that begins to assess whether these concerns are justified in a real-world context,” added Dr. Iltis, director of the Center for Bioethics, Health and Society and professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.

In an accompanying invited commentary, Sang Ngo, Anthony S. Kim, MD, and Winston Chiong, MD, PhD, write: “This work is welcome, as it presents experimental data to a bioethical debate that so far has been largely driven by conjecture and competing suppositions.”

The commentary authors, however, question the conclusiveness of the findings. “Interpreting the authors’ findings is complex and illustrates some of the challenges inherent to applying empirical data to ethical problems,” they write.
 

Recruitment realities

When asked his advice for researchers considering financial incentives, Dr. Halpern said: “All researchers would happily include incentives in their trial budgets if not for concerns that the sponsor or institutional review board might not approve of them.”

“By far the biggest threat to a trial’s success is the inability to enroll enough participants,” he added.

Dr. Iltis agreed, framing the need to boost enrollment in ethical terms. “There is another important ethical issue that often gets ignored, and that is the issue of studies that fail to enroll enough participants and are never completed or are underpowered,” she said.

“These studies end up exposing people to research risks and burdens without a compensating social benefit.”

“If incentives help to increase enrollment and do not necessarily result in undue influence or unfair participant selection, then there might be ethical reasons to offer incentives,” Dr. Iltis added.

Building on previous work assessing financial incentives in hypothetical clinical trials, Dr. Halpern and colleagues studied 654 participants with major depressive disorder in a smoking cessation trial. They also studied another 642 participants in a study that compared a gamification strategy to usual care for encouraging hospitalized patients to get out of bed and walk.

Dr. Halpern and colleagues randomly assigned people in the smoking cessation study to receive no financial compensation, $200, or $500. In the ambulation trial, participants were randomly allocated to receive no compensation, $100, or $300.
 

Key findings

A total of 22% of those offered no incentive enrolled in the smoking cessation study. In contrast, 36% offered $200 agreed, as did 47% of those offered $500, which the investigators say supports offering cash incentives to boost enrollment. The differences were significant (P < .001).

In contrast, the amount offered did not significantly incentivize more people to participate in the ambulation trial (P = .62). Rates were 45% with no compensation, 48% with $100 payment, and 43% with $300 payment.

In an analysis that adjusted for demographic differences, financial well-being, and Research Attitudes Questionnaire (RAQ-7) scores, each increase in cash incentive increased the odds of enrollment in the smoking cessation trial by 70% (adjusted odds ratio, 1.70; 95% confidence interval, 1.34-2.17).

The same effect was not seen in the ambulation trial, where each higher cash incentive did not make a significant difference (aOR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.64-1.22).

“The ambulation trial was a lower-risk trial in which patients’ willingness to participate was higher in general. So there were likely fewer people whose participation decisions could be influenced by offers of money,” Dr. Halpern said.
 

Inducement vs. coercion

The incentives in the study “did not function as unjust inducements, as they were not preferentially motivating across groups with different income levels or financial well-being in either trial,” the researchers note.

Dr. Halpern and colleagues also checked for any perceptions of coercion. More than 70% of participants in each smoking cessation trial group perceived no coercion, as did more than 93% of participants in each ambulation trial group, according to scores on a modified Perceived Coercion Scale of the MacArthur Admission Experience Survey. 

Furthermore, perception of risks did not significantly alter the association between cash incentives and enrollment in either trial.

After collecting the findings, Dr. Halpern and colleagues informed participants about their participation in RETAIN and explained the rationale for using different cash incentives. They also let all participants know they would ultimately receive the maximum incentive – either $500 or $300, depending on the trial.
 

Research implications

A study limitation was reliance on participant risk perception, as was an inability to measure perceived coercion among people who chose not to participant in the trials. Another potential limitation is that “neither of these parent trials posed particularly high risks. Future tests of incentives of different sizes, and in the context of higher-risk parent trials, including trials that test treatments of serious illnesses, are warranted,” the researchers note.

“While there are many more questions to ask and contexts in which to study the effects of incentives, this study calls on opponents of incentivizing research participants with money to be more humble,” Dr. Iltis said. “Incentives might not have the effects they assume they have and which they have long held make such incentives unethical.”

“I encourage researchers who are offering incentives to consider working with people doing ethics research to assess the effects of incentives in their studies,” Dr. Halpern said. “Real-world, as opposed to hypothetical studies that can improve our understanding of the impact of incentives can improve the ethical conduct of research over time.”
 

Responding to criticism

The authors of the invited commentary questioned the definitions Dr. Halpern and colleagues used for undue or unjust inducement. “Among bioethicists, there is no consensus about what counts as undue inducement or an unjust distribution of research burdens. In this article, the authors have operationalized these constructs based on their own interpretations of undue and unjust inducement, which may not capture all the concerns that scholars have raised about inducement.”

Asked to respond to this and other criticisms raised in the commentary, Dr. Halpern said: “Did our study answer all possible questions about incentives? Absolutely not. But when it comes to incentives for research participation, an ounce of data is worth a pound of conjecture.”

There was agreement, however, that the findings could now put the onus on opponents of financial incentives for trial participants.

“I agree with the commentary’s authors that our study essentially shifts the burden of proof, such that, as they say, ‘those who would limit [incentives’] application may owe us an applicable criterion,’ ” Dr. Halpern said.  

The authors of the invited commentary also criticized use of the study’s noninferiority design to rule out undue or unjust inducement. They note this design “may be unfamiliar to many bioethicists and can place substantial evaluative demands on readers.”

“As for the authors’ claim that noninferiority designs are difficult to interpret and unfamiliar to most clinicians and ethicists, I certainly agree,” Dr. Halpern said. “But that is hardly a reason to not employ the most rigorous methods possible to answer important questions.”

The study was supported by funding from the National Cancer Institute.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Paying people to participate in clinical trials remains controversial. But to date, most reservations are based on hypothetical scenarios or expert opinion with few real-world data to support them.

Research released this week could change that.

Investigators offered nearly 1,300 participants in two clinical trials either no payment or incentives up to $500 to partake in a smoking cessation study or an analysis of a behavioral intervention to increase ambulation in hospitalized patients.

More cash was associated with greater agreement to participate in the smoking cessation study but not the ambulation trial.

But the bigger news may be that offering payment did not appear to get people to accept more risks or skew participation to lower-income individuals, as some ethicists have warned.

“With the publication of our study, investigators finally have data that they can cite to put to rest any lingering concerns about offering moderate incentives in low-risk trials,” lead author Scott D. Halpern, MD, PhD, the John M. Eisenberg Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology, and Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, told this news organization.

This initial real-world data centers on low-risk interventions and more research is needed to analyze the ethics and effectiveness of paying people to join clinical trials with more inherent risk, the researchers note.

The study was published online Sept. 20 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
 

A good first step?

“Payments to research participants are notoriously controversial. Many people oppose payments altogether or insist on minimal payments out of concern that people might be unduly influenced to participate,” Ana S. Iltis, PhD, told this news organization when asked for comment. “Others worry that incentives will disproportionately motivate the less well-off to participate.” 

“This is an important study that begins to assess whether these concerns are justified in a real-world context,” added Dr. Iltis, director of the Center for Bioethics, Health and Society and professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.

In an accompanying invited commentary, Sang Ngo, Anthony S. Kim, MD, and Winston Chiong, MD, PhD, write: “This work is welcome, as it presents experimental data to a bioethical debate that so far has been largely driven by conjecture and competing suppositions.”

The commentary authors, however, question the conclusiveness of the findings. “Interpreting the authors’ findings is complex and illustrates some of the challenges inherent to applying empirical data to ethical problems,” they write.
 

Recruitment realities

When asked his advice for researchers considering financial incentives, Dr. Halpern said: “All researchers would happily include incentives in their trial budgets if not for concerns that the sponsor or institutional review board might not approve of them.”

“By far the biggest threat to a trial’s success is the inability to enroll enough participants,” he added.

Dr. Iltis agreed, framing the need to boost enrollment in ethical terms. “There is another important ethical issue that often gets ignored, and that is the issue of studies that fail to enroll enough participants and are never completed or are underpowered,” she said.

“These studies end up exposing people to research risks and burdens without a compensating social benefit.”

“If incentives help to increase enrollment and do not necessarily result in undue influence or unfair participant selection, then there might be ethical reasons to offer incentives,” Dr. Iltis added.

Building on previous work assessing financial incentives in hypothetical clinical trials, Dr. Halpern and colleagues studied 654 participants with major depressive disorder in a smoking cessation trial. They also studied another 642 participants in a study that compared a gamification strategy to usual care for encouraging hospitalized patients to get out of bed and walk.

Dr. Halpern and colleagues randomly assigned people in the smoking cessation study to receive no financial compensation, $200, or $500. In the ambulation trial, participants were randomly allocated to receive no compensation, $100, or $300.
 

Key findings

A total of 22% of those offered no incentive enrolled in the smoking cessation study. In contrast, 36% offered $200 agreed, as did 47% of those offered $500, which the investigators say supports offering cash incentives to boost enrollment. The differences were significant (P < .001).

In contrast, the amount offered did not significantly incentivize more people to participate in the ambulation trial (P = .62). Rates were 45% with no compensation, 48% with $100 payment, and 43% with $300 payment.

In an analysis that adjusted for demographic differences, financial well-being, and Research Attitudes Questionnaire (RAQ-7) scores, each increase in cash incentive increased the odds of enrollment in the smoking cessation trial by 70% (adjusted odds ratio, 1.70; 95% confidence interval, 1.34-2.17).

The same effect was not seen in the ambulation trial, where each higher cash incentive did not make a significant difference (aOR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.64-1.22).

“The ambulation trial was a lower-risk trial in which patients’ willingness to participate was higher in general. So there were likely fewer people whose participation decisions could be influenced by offers of money,” Dr. Halpern said.
 

Inducement vs. coercion

The incentives in the study “did not function as unjust inducements, as they were not preferentially motivating across groups with different income levels or financial well-being in either trial,” the researchers note.

Dr. Halpern and colleagues also checked for any perceptions of coercion. More than 70% of participants in each smoking cessation trial group perceived no coercion, as did more than 93% of participants in each ambulation trial group, according to scores on a modified Perceived Coercion Scale of the MacArthur Admission Experience Survey. 

Furthermore, perception of risks did not significantly alter the association between cash incentives and enrollment in either trial.

After collecting the findings, Dr. Halpern and colleagues informed participants about their participation in RETAIN and explained the rationale for using different cash incentives. They also let all participants know they would ultimately receive the maximum incentive – either $500 or $300, depending on the trial.
 

Research implications

A study limitation was reliance on participant risk perception, as was an inability to measure perceived coercion among people who chose not to participant in the trials. Another potential limitation is that “neither of these parent trials posed particularly high risks. Future tests of incentives of different sizes, and in the context of higher-risk parent trials, including trials that test treatments of serious illnesses, are warranted,” the researchers note.

“While there are many more questions to ask and contexts in which to study the effects of incentives, this study calls on opponents of incentivizing research participants with money to be more humble,” Dr. Iltis said. “Incentives might not have the effects they assume they have and which they have long held make such incentives unethical.”

“I encourage researchers who are offering incentives to consider working with people doing ethics research to assess the effects of incentives in their studies,” Dr. Halpern said. “Real-world, as opposed to hypothetical studies that can improve our understanding of the impact of incentives can improve the ethical conduct of research over time.”
 

Responding to criticism

The authors of the invited commentary questioned the definitions Dr. Halpern and colleagues used for undue or unjust inducement. “Among bioethicists, there is no consensus about what counts as undue inducement or an unjust distribution of research burdens. In this article, the authors have operationalized these constructs based on their own interpretations of undue and unjust inducement, which may not capture all the concerns that scholars have raised about inducement.”

Asked to respond to this and other criticisms raised in the commentary, Dr. Halpern said: “Did our study answer all possible questions about incentives? Absolutely not. But when it comes to incentives for research participation, an ounce of data is worth a pound of conjecture.”

There was agreement, however, that the findings could now put the onus on opponents of financial incentives for trial participants.

“I agree with the commentary’s authors that our study essentially shifts the burden of proof, such that, as they say, ‘those who would limit [incentives’] application may owe us an applicable criterion,’ ” Dr. Halpern said.  

The authors of the invited commentary also criticized use of the study’s noninferiority design to rule out undue or unjust inducement. They note this design “may be unfamiliar to many bioethicists and can place substantial evaluative demands on readers.”

“As for the authors’ claim that noninferiority designs are difficult to interpret and unfamiliar to most clinicians and ethicists, I certainly agree,” Dr. Halpern said. “But that is hardly a reason to not employ the most rigorous methods possible to answer important questions.”

The study was supported by funding from the National Cancer Institute.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Judy C. Washington, MD, a mentor of many young academic family physicians, particularly underrepresented-in-medicine (URM) physicians, advises her mentees on how to see ahead and plot paths to leadership.

Courtesy Dr. Judy C. Washington

For URM physicians, she also imparts a shared experience of being a minority in the field and helps prepare them for the challenges of facing racism or feeling marginalized or not equitably supported in academic life – and for making change.

While family medicine’s demographics have become more diverse over time, and more so than other specialties, they are not yet representative of the U.S. population. Within academia, male physicians who are Black or African American, or Hispanic or Latino, comprised about 4% and 5% of family medicine faculty, respectively, at the end of 2019, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. For women, these numbers were about 9% and 4%, respectively. (Only those with an MD degree exclusively were included in the report.)

“When you have the privilege to serve in leadership, you have the responsibility to reach back and identify and help others who would not otherwise have the opportunity to be recognized,” Dr. Washington said.

Her mentorship work stems in large part from her long-time involvement and leadership roles in the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) – roles she considers a pillar of her professional life. She currently serves as president of the STFM Foundation and is associate chief medical officer of the Atlantic Medical Group, a large multisite physician-led organization. She is also coordinator of women’s health for the Overlook Family Medicine Residency Program, which is affiliated with Atlantic Medical Group.

In Dr. Washington’s role as associate chief medical officer of Atlantic Medical Group in Summit, N.J., she focuses on physician engagement, satisfaction, and diversity. She also assists in areas such as population health. For the Overlook Family Medicine Residency Program also in Summit, she precepts residents in the obstetrics clinic and in the family medicine outpatient clinic.

Diana N. Carvajal, MD, MPH, one of Dr. Washington’s mentees, called her an “inspirational leader” for young academic faculty and said she is a familiar speaker at STFM meetings on topics of workforce diversity, equity, and leadership. She is “passionate” about mentorship, Dr. Carvajal said, and has understood “that URMs and women of color were not always getting [the mentorship they need to be successful].”
 

Guiding future leaders

Ivonne McLean, MD, assistant professor of family and community medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and an attending at a community health center in the Bronx, called Dr. Washington for advice a couple of years ago when she was considering her next career move.

Courtesy Society of Teachers of Family Medicine Foundation

“She took a genuine interest in me. She never said, this is what you should do. But the questions she asked and the examples she gave from her own life were incredibly helpful to me [in deciding to pursue a research fellowship] ... it was a pivotal conversation,” said Dr. McLean, associate director of a reproductive health fellowship and a research fellow in a New York State–funded program.

“From a lived experience angle, she also told me, here are some of the challenges you’ll have as a woman of color, and here are some of the ways you can approach that,” she said.

Dr. Carvajal, also a URM family physician, credits Dr. Washington’s mentorship with the development of a day-long workshop – held before the annual Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) meeting – on the low and declining rates of Black males in medicine. “We’d planned it as a presentation, and [she heard of it and] helped us expand it,” she said, calling Dr. Washington “warm, welcoming, and encouraging.

“That work and collaboration with her and the others she brought [into the process] have resulted in publications and more presentations and strategy building for diversifying the workforce,” said Dr. Carvajal, assistant professor, director of reproductive health education in family medicine, and codirector of the research section, all in the department of family and community medicine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

STFM involvement

Dr. Washington, who says that all or almost all of her mentees are now leaders in their academic institutions and communities, has been instrumental in developing STFM’s mentoring programming and in facilitating the organization’s multifaceted URM Initiative.

She has been active in STFM since the start of her academic career, and in 2009, while serving as assistant program director for the residency program in which she’d trained, she joined two other African American women, Monique Y. Davis-Smith, MD, and Joedrecka Brown-Speights, MD, in cochairing the society’s Group on Minority and Multicultural Health.

It was in this space, that Dr. Washington said she “heard people’s stories of being in major academic institutions and not feeling supported, not being given roadmaps to success, not getting assistance with publishing, or just kind of feeling like an outsider ... of not being pulled in.” Hispanic and African American females, in particular, “were feeling marginalized,” she said.

In 2018, having co-led development of the STFM Quality Mentoring Program for URM faculty, Dr. Washington was asked to join the STFM Foundation and subsequently led the STFM Foundation’s fundraising campaign for a new URM Initiative. She exceeded her goal, increasing support for URM participation in meetings and activities, and then participated in an STFM steering committee to create broader and longer-lasting support for URM faculty, community teachers, and medical students and residents going into academic family medicine.

Increasing the percentage of URM family medicine faculty in leadership positions – and raising awareness of structural barriers to achievement – is one of the current pillars of the URM Initiative.
 

Navigating the ‘minority tax’

As part of her mentoring, Dr. Washington helps URM physicians navigate the minority tax – a term referring to the uncompensated citizenship tasks that are more often assigned to Black and other URM physicians than to White physicians, and that take time away from scholarship, further perpetuating inequities.

Courtesy Society of Teahcers of Family Medicine Foundation

“Some of our young faculty members find themselves thrust into being the diversity and inclusion leaders in their institutions at a level at which they feel little power and little buy-in from [leadership],” she noted.

A commentary written by Dr. Washington and several colleagues on the minority tax as it impacts women – and the need to build a “tax shelter” to make academic medicine a more just environment for URM women – was published earlier this year in the Journal of Women’s Health.

She also answers e-mails and fields phone calls from young URM faculty who are mulling career moves and facing other familiar challenges.

Physicians who are URM, and African American physicians in particular, tend to “get pulled into the [often underserved] communities, into the patient care and community service areas,” Dr. Washington explained. “But unless you convert these projects into scholarship and publications, and unless you serve on a national committee outside of your institution, you’re not going to be promoted.”

Dr. Washington helps junior faculty envision themselves 5-plus years down the road, find what she calls scholarly “passion projects,” and prepare themselves for their next steps.

She helps her mentees navigate other parts of the continuum of unconscious bias and racism as well, from microaggressions from colleagues to overt discrimination from patients.

“I spend countless minutes fielding texts and phone calls from those who need support,” she wrote in a blog post. “They are a constant reminder that I must continue to speak up when I get the opportunity to do so.”
 

A journey through family medicine, and through bias and racism

Dr. Washington’s early days in medicine included graduating from Meharry Medical College in 1983 and the Mountainside Family Practice Residency Program in 1990. Following 6 years of working in a private practice in rural Maryland, she moved to academia, spending 6 years at East Tennessee State University and 4 years at the UMDNJ–New Jersey Medical School in Newark as an assistant professor of family medicine.

As had happened in rural Maryland, bias and racism have too often lurked during her career as a physician.

“I grew up in Alabama so I was pretty much ready to deal with racism in the South,” Dr. Washington said. “What I was not ready for was coming to the Northeast and seeing that you’re marginalized because you’re not invited into the room. Or if you do go into spaces when you’re the only one, you often don’t feel as welcomed as you thought you might be.”

Her ideas and contributions were too often dismissed, she wrote in a 2020 blog entry posted on her LinkedIn page. And during contract negotiations, “I was not aware of all the information that my White colleagues had. They had the advantage of inside information.”

Dr. Washington says that “it took a village” to make her who she is today: teachers in her segregated schools in Alabama, one of her college professors, her best friend in medical school – and STFM, “where the list [of her own mentors] is long.”

Judy C. Washington, MD, a mentor of many young academic family physicians, particularly underrepresented-in-medicine (URM) physicians, advises her mentees on how to see ahead and plot paths to leadership.

Courtesy Dr. Judy C. Washington

For URM physicians, she also imparts a shared experience of being a minority in the field and helps prepare them for the challenges of facing racism or feeling marginalized or not equitably supported in academic life – and for making change.

While family medicine’s demographics have become more diverse over time, and more so than other specialties, they are not yet representative of the U.S. population. Within academia, male physicians who are Black or African American, or Hispanic or Latino, comprised about 4% and 5% of family medicine faculty, respectively, at the end of 2019, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. For women, these numbers were about 9% and 4%, respectively. (Only those with an MD degree exclusively were included in the report.)

“When you have the privilege to serve in leadership, you have the responsibility to reach back and identify and help others who would not otherwise have the opportunity to be recognized,” Dr. Washington said.

Her mentorship work stems in large part from her long-time involvement and leadership roles in the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) – roles she considers a pillar of her professional life. She currently serves as president of the STFM Foundation and is associate chief medical officer of the Atlantic Medical Group, a large multisite physician-led organization. She is also coordinator of women’s health for the Overlook Family Medicine Residency Program, which is affiliated with Atlantic Medical Group.

In Dr. Washington’s role as associate chief medical officer of Atlantic Medical Group in Summit, N.J., she focuses on physician engagement, satisfaction, and diversity. She also assists in areas such as population health. For the Overlook Family Medicine Residency Program also in Summit, she precepts residents in the obstetrics clinic and in the family medicine outpatient clinic.

Diana N. Carvajal, MD, MPH, one of Dr. Washington’s mentees, called her an “inspirational leader” for young academic faculty and said she is a familiar speaker at STFM meetings on topics of workforce diversity, equity, and leadership. She is “passionate” about mentorship, Dr. Carvajal said, and has understood “that URMs and women of color were not always getting [the mentorship they need to be successful].”
 

Guiding future leaders

Ivonne McLean, MD, assistant professor of family and community medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and an attending at a community health center in the Bronx, called Dr. Washington for advice a couple of years ago when she was considering her next career move.

Courtesy Society of Teachers of Family Medicine Foundation

“She took a genuine interest in me. She never said, this is what you should do. But the questions she asked and the examples she gave from her own life were incredibly helpful to me [in deciding to pursue a research fellowship] ... it was a pivotal conversation,” said Dr. McLean, associate director of a reproductive health fellowship and a research fellow in a New York State–funded program.

“From a lived experience angle, she also told me, here are some of the challenges you’ll have as a woman of color, and here are some of the ways you can approach that,” she said.

Dr. Carvajal, also a URM family physician, credits Dr. Washington’s mentorship with the development of a day-long workshop – held before the annual Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) meeting – on the low and declining rates of Black males in medicine. “We’d planned it as a presentation, and [she heard of it and] helped us expand it,” she said, calling Dr. Washington “warm, welcoming, and encouraging.

“That work and collaboration with her and the others she brought [into the process] have resulted in publications and more presentations and strategy building for diversifying the workforce,” said Dr. Carvajal, assistant professor, director of reproductive health education in family medicine, and codirector of the research section, all in the department of family and community medicine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

STFM involvement

Dr. Washington, who says that all or almost all of her mentees are now leaders in their academic institutions and communities, has been instrumental in developing STFM’s mentoring programming and in facilitating the organization’s multifaceted URM Initiative.

She has been active in STFM since the start of her academic career, and in 2009, while serving as assistant program director for the residency program in which she’d trained, she joined two other African American women, Monique Y. Davis-Smith, MD, and Joedrecka Brown-Speights, MD, in cochairing the society’s Group on Minority and Multicultural Health.

It was in this space, that Dr. Washington said she “heard people’s stories of being in major academic institutions and not feeling supported, not being given roadmaps to success, not getting assistance with publishing, or just kind of feeling like an outsider ... of not being pulled in.” Hispanic and African American females, in particular, “were feeling marginalized,” she said.

In 2018, having co-led development of the STFM Quality Mentoring Program for URM faculty, Dr. Washington was asked to join the STFM Foundation and subsequently led the STFM Foundation’s fundraising campaign for a new URM Initiative. She exceeded her goal, increasing support for URM participation in meetings and activities, and then participated in an STFM steering committee to create broader and longer-lasting support for URM faculty, community teachers, and medical students and residents going into academic family medicine.

Increasing the percentage of URM family medicine faculty in leadership positions – and raising awareness of structural barriers to achievement – is one of the current pillars of the URM Initiative.
 

Navigating the ‘minority tax’

As part of her mentoring, Dr. Washington helps URM physicians navigate the minority tax – a term referring to the uncompensated citizenship tasks that are more often assigned to Black and other URM physicians than to White physicians, and that take time away from scholarship, further perpetuating inequities.

Courtesy Society of Teahcers of Family Medicine Foundation

“Some of our young faculty members find themselves thrust into being the diversity and inclusion leaders in their institutions at a level at which they feel little power and little buy-in from [leadership],” she noted.

A commentary written by Dr. Washington and several colleagues on the minority tax as it impacts women – and the need to build a “tax shelter” to make academic medicine a more just environment for URM women – was published earlier this year in the Journal of Women’s Health.

She also answers e-mails and fields phone calls from young URM faculty who are mulling career moves and facing other familiar challenges.

Physicians who are URM, and African American physicians in particular, tend to “get pulled into the [often underserved] communities, into the patient care and community service areas,” Dr. Washington explained. “But unless you convert these projects into scholarship and publications, and unless you serve on a national committee outside of your institution, you’re not going to be promoted.”

Dr. Washington helps junior faculty envision themselves 5-plus years down the road, find what she calls scholarly “passion projects,” and prepare themselves for their next steps.

She helps her mentees navigate other parts of the continuum of unconscious bias and racism as well, from microaggressions from colleagues to overt discrimination from patients.

“I spend countless minutes fielding texts and phone calls from those who need support,” she wrote in a blog post. “They are a constant reminder that I must continue to speak up when I get the opportunity to do so.”
 

A journey through family medicine, and through bias and racism

Dr. Washington’s early days in medicine included graduating from Meharry Medical College in 1983 and the Mountainside Family Practice Residency Program in 1990. Following 6 years of working in a private practice in rural Maryland, she moved to academia, spending 6 years at East Tennessee State University and 4 years at the UMDNJ–New Jersey Medical School in Newark as an assistant professor of family medicine.

As had happened in rural Maryland, bias and racism have too often lurked during her career as a physician.

“I grew up in Alabama so I was pretty much ready to deal with racism in the South,” Dr. Washington said. “What I was not ready for was coming to the Northeast and seeing that you’re marginalized because you’re not invited into the room. Or if you do go into spaces when you’re the only one, you often don’t feel as welcomed as you thought you might be.”

Her ideas and contributions were too often dismissed, she wrote in a 2020 blog entry posted on her LinkedIn page. And during contract negotiations, “I was not aware of all the information that my White colleagues had. They had the advantage of inside information.”

Dr. Washington says that “it took a village” to make her who she is today: teachers in her segregated schools in Alabama, one of her college professors, her best friend in medical school – and STFM, “where the list [of her own mentors] is long.”

Judy C. Washington, MD, a mentor of many young academic family physicians, particularly underrepresented-in-medicine (URM) physicians, advises her mentees on how to see ahead and plot paths to leadership.

Courtesy Dr. Judy C. Washington

For URM physicians, she also imparts a shared experience of being a minority in the field and helps prepare them for the challenges of facing racism or feeling marginalized or not equitably supported in academic life – and for making change.

While family medicine’s demographics have become more diverse over time, and more so than other specialties, they are not yet representative of the U.S. population. Within academia, male physicians who are Black or African American, or Hispanic or Latino, comprised about 4% and 5% of family medicine faculty, respectively, at the end of 2019, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. For women, these numbers were about 9% and 4%, respectively. (Only those with an MD degree exclusively were included in the report.)

“When you have the privilege to serve in leadership, you have the responsibility to reach back and identify and help others who would not otherwise have the opportunity to be recognized,” Dr. Washington said.

Her mentorship work stems in large part from her long-time involvement and leadership roles in the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) – roles she considers a pillar of her professional life. She currently serves as president of the STFM Foundation and is associate chief medical officer of the Atlantic Medical Group, a large multisite physician-led organization. She is also coordinator of women’s health for the Overlook Family Medicine Residency Program, which is affiliated with Atlantic Medical Group.

In Dr. Washington’s role as associate chief medical officer of Atlantic Medical Group in Summit, N.J., she focuses on physician engagement, satisfaction, and diversity. She also assists in areas such as population health. For the Overlook Family Medicine Residency Program also in Summit, she precepts residents in the obstetrics clinic and in the family medicine outpatient clinic.

Diana N. Carvajal, MD, MPH, one of Dr. Washington’s mentees, called her an “inspirational leader” for young academic faculty and said she is a familiar speaker at STFM meetings on topics of workforce diversity, equity, and leadership. She is “passionate” about mentorship, Dr. Carvajal said, and has understood “that URMs and women of color were not always getting [the mentorship they need to be successful].”
 

Guiding future leaders

Ivonne McLean, MD, assistant professor of family and community medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and an attending at a community health center in the Bronx, called Dr. Washington for advice a couple of years ago when she was considering her next career move.

Courtesy Society of Teachers of Family Medicine Foundation

“She took a genuine interest in me. She never said, this is what you should do. But the questions she asked and the examples she gave from her own life were incredibly helpful to me [in deciding to pursue a research fellowship] ... it was a pivotal conversation,” said Dr. McLean, associate director of a reproductive health fellowship and a research fellow in a New York State–funded program.

“From a lived experience angle, she also told me, here are some of the challenges you’ll have as a woman of color, and here are some of the ways you can approach that,” she said.

Dr. Carvajal, also a URM family physician, credits Dr. Washington’s mentorship with the development of a day-long workshop – held before the annual Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) meeting – on the low and declining rates of Black males in medicine. “We’d planned it as a presentation, and [she heard of it and] helped us expand it,” she said, calling Dr. Washington “warm, welcoming, and encouraging.

“That work and collaboration with her and the others she brought [into the process] have resulted in publications and more presentations and strategy building for diversifying the workforce,” said Dr. Carvajal, assistant professor, director of reproductive health education in family medicine, and codirector of the research section, all in the department of family and community medicine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

STFM involvement

Dr. Washington, who says that all or almost all of her mentees are now leaders in their academic institutions and communities, has been instrumental in developing STFM’s mentoring programming and in facilitating the organization’s multifaceted URM Initiative.

She has been active in STFM since the start of her academic career, and in 2009, while serving as assistant program director for the residency program in which she’d trained, she joined two other African American women, Monique Y. Davis-Smith, MD, and Joedrecka Brown-Speights, MD, in cochairing the society’s Group on Minority and Multicultural Health.

It was in this space, that Dr. Washington said she “heard people’s stories of being in major academic institutions and not feeling supported, not being given roadmaps to success, not getting assistance with publishing, or just kind of feeling like an outsider ... of not being pulled in.” Hispanic and African American females, in particular, “were feeling marginalized,” she said.

In 2018, having co-led development of the STFM Quality Mentoring Program for URM faculty, Dr. Washington was asked to join the STFM Foundation and subsequently led the STFM Foundation’s fundraising campaign for a new URM Initiative. She exceeded her goal, increasing support for URM participation in meetings and activities, and then participated in an STFM steering committee to create broader and longer-lasting support for URM faculty, community teachers, and medical students and residents going into academic family medicine.

Increasing the percentage of URM family medicine faculty in leadership positions – and raising awareness of structural barriers to achievement – is one of the current pillars of the URM Initiative.
 

Navigating the ‘minority tax’

As part of her mentoring, Dr. Washington helps URM physicians navigate the minority tax – a term referring to the uncompensated citizenship tasks that are more often assigned to Black and other URM physicians than to White physicians, and that take time away from scholarship, further perpetuating inequities.

Courtesy Society of Teahcers of Family Medicine Foundation

“Some of our young faculty members find themselves thrust into being the diversity and inclusion leaders in their institutions at a level at which they feel little power and little buy-in from [leadership],” she noted.

A commentary written by Dr. Washington and several colleagues on the minority tax as it impacts women – and the need to build a “tax shelter” to make academic medicine a more just environment for URM women – was published earlier this year in the Journal of Women’s Health.

She also answers e-mails and fields phone calls from young URM faculty who are mulling career moves and facing other familiar challenges.

Physicians who are URM, and African American physicians in particular, tend to “get pulled into the [often underserved] communities, into the patient care and community service areas,” Dr. Washington explained. “But unless you convert these projects into scholarship and publications, and unless you serve on a national committee outside of your institution, you’re not going to be promoted.”

Dr. Washington helps junior faculty envision themselves 5-plus years down the road, find what she calls scholarly “passion projects,” and prepare themselves for their next steps.

She helps her mentees navigate other parts of the continuum of unconscious bias and racism as well, from microaggressions from colleagues to overt discrimination from patients.

“I spend countless minutes fielding texts and phone calls from those who need support,” she wrote in a blog post. “They are a constant reminder that I must continue to speak up when I get the opportunity to do so.”
 

A journey through family medicine, and through bias and racism

Dr. Washington’s early days in medicine included graduating from Meharry Medical College in 1983 and the Mountainside Family Practice Residency Program in 1990. Following 6 years of working in a private practice in rural Maryland, she moved to academia, spending 6 years at East Tennessee State University and 4 years at the UMDNJ–New Jersey Medical School in Newark as an assistant professor of family medicine.

As had happened in rural Maryland, bias and racism have too often lurked during her career as a physician.

“I grew up in Alabama so I was pretty much ready to deal with racism in the South,” Dr. Washington said. “What I was not ready for was coming to the Northeast and seeing that you’re marginalized because you’re not invited into the room. Or if you do go into spaces when you’re the only one, you often don’t feel as welcomed as you thought you might be.”

Her ideas and contributions were too often dismissed, she wrote in a 2020 blog entry posted on her LinkedIn page. And during contract negotiations, “I was not aware of all the information that my White colleagues had. They had the advantage of inside information.”

Dr. Washington says that “it took a village” to make her who she is today: teachers in her segregated schools in Alabama, one of her college professors, her best friend in medical school – and STFM, “where the list [of her own mentors] is long.”

Many people are confused — patients and healthcare providers alike — in the wake of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announcements about who is authorized to get a third or ‘booster’ shot of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

The official word on boosters from the CDC in the early morning hours of September 24 sparked a jump in people calling about or coming in for a third shot, healthcare providers report. At the same time, the uncertainty from changing federal messages about boosters is causing some chaos, especially in the form of vaccine misinformation.

The confusion started, in part, with the August 13 announcement that immunocompromised Americans were eligible for a booster shot. Next came the initial Biden administration intention to provide most U.S. adults with a third shot starting September 20 — an announcement later rolled back — followed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) limiting boosters to select groups last week.

“It was only 3% of the population that was going to be getting a third dose, then it was back to everyone being able to get the booster, and then it’s back to a select crew,” Louito Edje, MD, a family physician in private practice in Cincinnati, said in an interview with this news organization.

This kind of mixed messaging is generating more questions than answers.  

“Even though that is following the science, translating the science into policy, it’s really fraught with confusion for patients, especially,” added Dr. Edje, professor educator in the departments of medical education and family and community medicine at UC Health and a fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

When asked if he’s seeing more uncertainty about boosters, community pharmacist Brian Caswell, RPh, said: “I’m going to have to say yes because I’ve been confused myself at times.”

“Yes, there is a lot of confusion,” added Mr. Caswell, owner or co-owner of four pharmacies in Kansas and Missouri and president of the National Community Pharmacists Association. 
 

Boosting misinformation?

“Unfortunately, confusion leads to an acceleration of misinformation,” Mr. Caswell said.

Dr. Edje shared an example. “The folks who have been hesitant to even get the first vaccine appear now a little less likely to want to go ahead and get vaccinated.”

These patients point to breakthrough COVID-19 cases of the Delta variant, which “reinforces that they don’t need to get vaccinated in the first place,” Dr. Edje said.

“That’s unfortunate because it’s a complete fallacy.”

Clearer communication from the federal government could help alleviate confusion, Mr. Caswell said. “I would like to see an official CDC chart that states who is eligible as of a certain date. Something that is accessible through their webpage or a social media source that can be updated. That would help all of us.”

“For myself, I’ve got patients from Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri that might be operating under different guidelines. That makes it even more confusing,” he said.

More clarity is needed for individuals seeking boosters as well. “It would help to be very clear with the general public, who are becoming very knowledgeable within this vaccine realm,” Mr. Caswell said.
 

‘Gaming the system’

Although most people seeking a booster shot at one of Caswell’s pharmacies are following official recommendations, there are some who remain ineligible but nonetheless come in for an additional vaccine.

“Even before this announcement last Friday, in the latter part of August when the CDC talked about a booster for immunocompromised, we had interest from people who did not meet the criteria,” Mr. Caswell said.

To the ineligible, he and his staff explain the approval process, why certain decisions are made, and point out that the number of eligible Americans is likely to expand in the future.

“The vast majority of them are understanding,” Mr. Caswell said. “But we’ve had some people who really didn’t want to accept the information, and I don’t know what they’ve done.”

“Some people are gaming the system to get their booster or second shot of J&J,” he said.

For example, Mr. Caswell had a patient who crossed over state lines from Missouri seeking a vaccine booster at Wolkar Drug, a pharmacy in Baxter Springs, Kan. “We found out later he had a J&J shot at a facility or provider in Missouri. He came over to Kansas, signed up for it and got a booster with Moderna.”

“We called and asked him if he was aware of it. He said, ‘yes.’ When we questioned him more about it, he hung up.”

Dr. Edje is likewise seeing interest from some ineligible patients, she said.
 

Crossing a liability line?

Mr. Caswell has asked for advice from lawyers and the State Board of Pharmacy on potential liability if a pharmacist gives a booster to a patient not eligible under the official FDA and CDC guidance.

“We ask patients direct questions about whether they’ve had the COVID vaccine, COVID, and a whole litany of questions they must answer. And we’re assuming they are going to be honest and forthright,” he said. “The pharmacist needs to make sure they make every effort to get that information from the patient.”

Normally, healthcare providers like Mr. Caswell report each COVID-19 vaccination to the state registry after administration. “We have not gone through a police action and checked the registry first,” he said.

But, if people continue to try ‘gaming the system,’ he said, he might have to start checking the state registry before giving someone a booster.

The American Academy of Family Physicians offers advice from the CDC about legal protections for providers.

“As outlined by CDC, any off-label use of the Comirnaty/Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is not authorized at this time and may not be covered under the PREP Act or the PREP Act declaration. This means that clinicians providing the vaccine outside of the authorized/approved use may not have immunity from claims,” the AAFP website states.

“Per CDC, individuals who receive a third dose may not be eligible for compensation after a possible adverse event. Such use would be in violation of the CDC COVID-19 vaccination program provider agreement and therefore may not be reimbursable and may impact the ability of a provider to remain in the CDC program, in addition to other potential sanctions. Administration fees for off-label doses may not be reimbursed by payers.”
 

Despite confusion, demand is up

Even amid all the uncertainty, there appears to be a jump in enthusiasm for the booster shots.

“The requests have gone up quite a bit. We’ve seen a number of requests from people in person and over the phone looking to get a booster,” Mr. Caswell said. “Since the discussion at the federal level...there has been a lot of interest in the third shot booster, itself, as well as about a booster for J&J.”

“There is quite a bit of excitement out there,” he said.

Dr. Edje agreed: “I take care of a fair number of folks...including the elderly and healthcare professionals. They are already asking for the booster.”

Interestingly, Dr. Edje would like to get a booster herself but is not eligible for the Pfizer third shot. She is a participant in a Moderna vaccine trial and can only receive additional immunization as part of the study.
 

‘Walk, don’t run’

To quell any potential early rush to get a third shot, U.S. health officials are reminding booster-ineligible people that they still have some protection against COVID-19.

“If you’re a person who ultimately might get a booster that will make you optimally protected, you don’t necessarily need to get it tomorrow,” Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told CNN.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, also weighed in. She told ABC that boosters for people who received a Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine will be addressed with urgency.

“I want to reiterate that this is a very slow wane. There is no urgency here to go and get your booster immediately. You know, walk don’t run to your booster appointment,” she said.

“We will come and look at the data for Moderna and J&J in very short order.”

Dr. Edje and Mr. Caswell have reported no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Many people are confused — patients and healthcare providers alike — in the wake of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announcements about who is authorized to get a third or ‘booster’ shot of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

The official word on boosters from the CDC in the early morning hours of September 24 sparked a jump in people calling about or coming in for a third shot, healthcare providers report. At the same time, the uncertainty from changing federal messages about boosters is causing some chaos, especially in the form of vaccine misinformation.

The confusion started, in part, with the August 13 announcement that immunocompromised Americans were eligible for a booster shot. Next came the initial Biden administration intention to provide most U.S. adults with a third shot starting September 20 — an announcement later rolled back — followed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) limiting boosters to select groups last week.

“It was only 3% of the population that was going to be getting a third dose, then it was back to everyone being able to get the booster, and then it’s back to a select crew,” Louito Edje, MD, a family physician in private practice in Cincinnati, said in an interview with this news organization.

This kind of mixed messaging is generating more questions than answers.  

“Even though that is following the science, translating the science into policy, it’s really fraught with confusion for patients, especially,” added Dr. Edje, professor educator in the departments of medical education and family and community medicine at UC Health and a fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

When asked if he’s seeing more uncertainty about boosters, community pharmacist Brian Caswell, RPh, said: “I’m going to have to say yes because I’ve been confused myself at times.”

“Yes, there is a lot of confusion,” added Mr. Caswell, owner or co-owner of four pharmacies in Kansas and Missouri and president of the National Community Pharmacists Association. 
 

Boosting misinformation?

“Unfortunately, confusion leads to an acceleration of misinformation,” Mr. Caswell said.

Dr. Edje shared an example. “The folks who have been hesitant to even get the first vaccine appear now a little less likely to want to go ahead and get vaccinated.”

These patients point to breakthrough COVID-19 cases of the Delta variant, which “reinforces that they don’t need to get vaccinated in the first place,” Dr. Edje said.

“That’s unfortunate because it’s a complete fallacy.”

Clearer communication from the federal government could help alleviate confusion, Mr. Caswell said. “I would like to see an official CDC chart that states who is eligible as of a certain date. Something that is accessible through their webpage or a social media source that can be updated. That would help all of us.”

“For myself, I’ve got patients from Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri that might be operating under different guidelines. That makes it even more confusing,” he said.

More clarity is needed for individuals seeking boosters as well. “It would help to be very clear with the general public, who are becoming very knowledgeable within this vaccine realm,” Mr. Caswell said.
 

‘Gaming the system’

Although most people seeking a booster shot at one of Caswell’s pharmacies are following official recommendations, there are some who remain ineligible but nonetheless come in for an additional vaccine.

“Even before this announcement last Friday, in the latter part of August when the CDC talked about a booster for immunocompromised, we had interest from people who did not meet the criteria,” Mr. Caswell said.

To the ineligible, he and his staff explain the approval process, why certain decisions are made, and point out that the number of eligible Americans is likely to expand in the future.

“The vast majority of them are understanding,” Mr. Caswell said. “But we’ve had some people who really didn’t want to accept the information, and I don’t know what they’ve done.”

“Some people are gaming the system to get their booster or second shot of J&J,” he said.

For example, Mr. Caswell had a patient who crossed over state lines from Missouri seeking a vaccine booster at Wolkar Drug, a pharmacy in Baxter Springs, Kan. “We found out later he had a J&J shot at a facility or provider in Missouri. He came over to Kansas, signed up for it and got a booster with Moderna.”

“We called and asked him if he was aware of it. He said, ‘yes.’ When we questioned him more about it, he hung up.”

Dr. Edje is likewise seeing interest from some ineligible patients, she said.
 

Crossing a liability line?

Mr. Caswell has asked for advice from lawyers and the State Board of Pharmacy on potential liability if a pharmacist gives a booster to a patient not eligible under the official FDA and CDC guidance.

“We ask patients direct questions about whether they’ve had the COVID vaccine, COVID, and a whole litany of questions they must answer. And we’re assuming they are going to be honest and forthright,” he said. “The pharmacist needs to make sure they make every effort to get that information from the patient.”

Normally, healthcare providers like Mr. Caswell report each COVID-19 vaccination to the state registry after administration. “We have not gone through a police action and checked the registry first,” he said.

But, if people continue to try ‘gaming the system,’ he said, he might have to start checking the state registry before giving someone a booster.

The American Academy of Family Physicians offers advice from the CDC about legal protections for providers.

“As outlined by CDC, any off-label use of the Comirnaty/Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is not authorized at this time and may not be covered under the PREP Act or the PREP Act declaration. This means that clinicians providing the vaccine outside of the authorized/approved use may not have immunity from claims,” the AAFP website states.

“Per CDC, individuals who receive a third dose may not be eligible for compensation after a possible adverse event. Such use would be in violation of the CDC COVID-19 vaccination program provider agreement and therefore may not be reimbursable and may impact the ability of a provider to remain in the CDC program, in addition to other potential sanctions. Administration fees for off-label doses may not be reimbursed by payers.”
 

Despite confusion, demand is up

Even amid all the uncertainty, there appears to be a jump in enthusiasm for the booster shots.

“The requests have gone up quite a bit. We’ve seen a number of requests from people in person and over the phone looking to get a booster,” Mr. Caswell said. “Since the discussion at the federal level...there has been a lot of interest in the third shot booster, itself, as well as about a booster for J&J.”

“There is quite a bit of excitement out there,” he said.

Dr. Edje agreed: “I take care of a fair number of folks...including the elderly and healthcare professionals. They are already asking for the booster.”

Interestingly, Dr. Edje would like to get a booster herself but is not eligible for the Pfizer third shot. She is a participant in a Moderna vaccine trial and can only receive additional immunization as part of the study.
 

‘Walk, don’t run’

To quell any potential early rush to get a third shot, U.S. health officials are reminding booster-ineligible people that they still have some protection against COVID-19.

“If you’re a person who ultimately might get a booster that will make you optimally protected, you don’t necessarily need to get it tomorrow,” Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told CNN.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, also weighed in. She told ABC that boosters for people who received a Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine will be addressed with urgency.

“I want to reiterate that this is a very slow wane. There is no urgency here to go and get your booster immediately. You know, walk don’t run to your booster appointment,” she said.

“We will come and look at the data for Moderna and J&J in very short order.”

Dr. Edje and Mr. Caswell have reported no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Many people are confused — patients and healthcare providers alike — in the wake of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announcements about who is authorized to get a third or ‘booster’ shot of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

The official word on boosters from the CDC in the early morning hours of September 24 sparked a jump in people calling about or coming in for a third shot, healthcare providers report. At the same time, the uncertainty from changing federal messages about boosters is causing some chaos, especially in the form of vaccine misinformation.

The confusion started, in part, with the August 13 announcement that immunocompromised Americans were eligible for a booster shot. Next came the initial Biden administration intention to provide most U.S. adults with a third shot starting September 20 — an announcement later rolled back — followed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) limiting boosters to select groups last week.

“It was only 3% of the population that was going to be getting a third dose, then it was back to everyone being able to get the booster, and then it’s back to a select crew,” Louito Edje, MD, a family physician in private practice in Cincinnati, said in an interview with this news organization.

This kind of mixed messaging is generating more questions than answers.  

“Even though that is following the science, translating the science into policy, it’s really fraught with confusion for patients, especially,” added Dr. Edje, professor educator in the departments of medical education and family and community medicine at UC Health and a fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

When asked if he’s seeing more uncertainty about boosters, community pharmacist Brian Caswell, RPh, said: “I’m going to have to say yes because I’ve been confused myself at times.”

“Yes, there is a lot of confusion,” added Mr. Caswell, owner or co-owner of four pharmacies in Kansas and Missouri and president of the National Community Pharmacists Association. 
 

Boosting misinformation?

“Unfortunately, confusion leads to an acceleration of misinformation,” Mr. Caswell said.

Dr. Edje shared an example. “The folks who have been hesitant to even get the first vaccine appear now a little less likely to want to go ahead and get vaccinated.”

These patients point to breakthrough COVID-19 cases of the Delta variant, which “reinforces that they don’t need to get vaccinated in the first place,” Dr. Edje said.

“That’s unfortunate because it’s a complete fallacy.”

Clearer communication from the federal government could help alleviate confusion, Mr. Caswell said. “I would like to see an official CDC chart that states who is eligible as of a certain date. Something that is accessible through their webpage or a social media source that can be updated. That would help all of us.”

“For myself, I’ve got patients from Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri that might be operating under different guidelines. That makes it even more confusing,” he said.

More clarity is needed for individuals seeking boosters as well. “It would help to be very clear with the general public, who are becoming very knowledgeable within this vaccine realm,” Mr. Caswell said.
 

‘Gaming the system’

Although most people seeking a booster shot at one of Caswell’s pharmacies are following official recommendations, there are some who remain ineligible but nonetheless come in for an additional vaccine.

“Even before this announcement last Friday, in the latter part of August when the CDC talked about a booster for immunocompromised, we had interest from people who did not meet the criteria,” Mr. Caswell said.

To the ineligible, he and his staff explain the approval process, why certain decisions are made, and point out that the number of eligible Americans is likely to expand in the future.

“The vast majority of them are understanding,” Mr. Caswell said. “But we’ve had some people who really didn’t want to accept the information, and I don’t know what they’ve done.”

“Some people are gaming the system to get their booster or second shot of J&J,” he said.

For example, Mr. Caswell had a patient who crossed over state lines from Missouri seeking a vaccine booster at Wolkar Drug, a pharmacy in Baxter Springs, Kan. “We found out later he had a J&J shot at a facility or provider in Missouri. He came over to Kansas, signed up for it and got a booster with Moderna.”

“We called and asked him if he was aware of it. He said, ‘yes.’ When we questioned him more about it, he hung up.”

Dr. Edje is likewise seeing interest from some ineligible patients, she said.
 

Crossing a liability line?

Mr. Caswell has asked for advice from lawyers and the State Board of Pharmacy on potential liability if a pharmacist gives a booster to a patient not eligible under the official FDA and CDC guidance.

“We ask patients direct questions about whether they’ve had the COVID vaccine, COVID, and a whole litany of questions they must answer. And we’re assuming they are going to be honest and forthright,” he said. “The pharmacist needs to make sure they make every effort to get that information from the patient.”

Normally, healthcare providers like Mr. Caswell report each COVID-19 vaccination to the state registry after administration. “We have not gone through a police action and checked the registry first,” he said.

But, if people continue to try ‘gaming the system,’ he said, he might have to start checking the state registry before giving someone a booster.

The American Academy of Family Physicians offers advice from the CDC about legal protections for providers.

“As outlined by CDC, any off-label use of the Comirnaty/Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is not authorized at this time and may not be covered under the PREP Act or the PREP Act declaration. This means that clinicians providing the vaccine outside of the authorized/approved use may not have immunity from claims,” the AAFP website states.

“Per CDC, individuals who receive a third dose may not be eligible for compensation after a possible adverse event. Such use would be in violation of the CDC COVID-19 vaccination program provider agreement and therefore may not be reimbursable and may impact the ability of a provider to remain in the CDC program, in addition to other potential sanctions. Administration fees for off-label doses may not be reimbursed by payers.”
 

Despite confusion, demand is up

Even amid all the uncertainty, there appears to be a jump in enthusiasm for the booster shots.

“The requests have gone up quite a bit. We’ve seen a number of requests from people in person and over the phone looking to get a booster,” Mr. Caswell said. “Since the discussion at the federal level...there has been a lot of interest in the third shot booster, itself, as well as about a booster for J&J.”

“There is quite a bit of excitement out there,” he said.

Dr. Edje agreed: “I take care of a fair number of folks...including the elderly and healthcare professionals. They are already asking for the booster.”

Interestingly, Dr. Edje would like to get a booster herself but is not eligible for the Pfizer third shot. She is a participant in a Moderna vaccine trial and can only receive additional immunization as part of the study.
 

‘Walk, don’t run’

To quell any potential early rush to get a third shot, U.S. health officials are reminding booster-ineligible people that they still have some protection against COVID-19.

“If you’re a person who ultimately might get a booster that will make you optimally protected, you don’t necessarily need to get it tomorrow,” Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told CNN.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, also weighed in. She told ABC that boosters for people who received a Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine will be addressed with urgency.

“I want to reiterate that this is a very slow wane. There is no urgency here to go and get your booster immediately. You know, walk don’t run to your booster appointment,” she said.

“We will come and look at the data for Moderna and J&J in very short order.”

Dr. Edje and Mr. Caswell have reported no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Novel food for thought

When you were growing up, your parents probably told you to brush your teeth before you went to bed, warned you not to run with the scissors or play with matches, and punished you whenever you used the neighbor children to play Schrödinger’s cat.

World Wildlife/StockSnap

They did those things for your own good, of course, and now the nation’s mother – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – is doing the same by warning us about novel outbreak–associated foods. As in, “Put down that novel outbreak–associated food! You don’t know where it’s been!”

Seriously, you don’t know where it’s been. CDC investigators identified 28 novel foods that were linked to 36 foodborne-disease outbreaks that occurred during 2007-2016, including moringa leaf (herb/spice), tempeh (grain), frog, sprouted nut butter, and skate.

The novel foods implicated in these outbreaks were more likely to be imported, compared with 14,216 outbreaks that occurred from 1973 to 2016, and about half didn’t require refrigeration. Two-thirds did not need to be cooked after purchase. Another thing your parents wouldn’t like: Some can’t be washed, like sheep milk, sugar cane, or the aforementioned nut butter.

We wanted to get a food expert to comment on these novel foods, but our editor said that the assistant manager of our local Burger King wasn’t expert enough, so we’ve commandeered someone else’s expert. Cynthia Sears, MD, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told Today.com all about the dangers of frogs: “Essentially all amphibians are contaminated, often with salmonella. Eating any amphibian that is not thoroughly cooked is a risk.”

Be sure to cook your amphibians before you eat them. Advice that your parents would be proud to share.
 

Dieters should stay away from diet drinks

When a drink is labeled “diet” many assume that the calorie-free beverage is the best choice. However, one of the largest studies to date on artificial sweeteners is out to set the record straight.

American Heart Association

Artificial sweeteners, or nonnutritive sweeteners (NNS), are used in most if not all diet products to give the illusion of sweetness without the caloric guilt. Some studies say they help with weight loss for that very reason, but others say they can contribute to weight gain. So which is it?

Researchers at the University of Southern California sought to add some clarity to the research already out there.

They looked at an even-gendered split of 74 participants who drank 300 mL of drinks sweetened with NNS, table sugar, or water. The researchers then used functional MRI to see how parts of the brain responsible for appetite and cravings responded to images of high-calorie foods. They also looked at glucose, insulin, and other metabolic hormone levels, as well as how much food the participants ate at their free buffet. (In the participants’ defense, who can say no to a free buffet?)

The researchers made some interesting observations:

• Women who drank the NNS drink ate more than did the table-sugar group, but all men ate the same.
• Images of those calorie-packed goodies increased cravings and appetite for obese men and women in the NNS group, compared with the table-sugar group.
• For all participants who drank the NNS drink, there was a decrease in the hormone that tells the body it’s full.

“By studying different groups we were able to show that females and people with obesity may be more sensitive to artificial sweeteners. For these groups, drinking artificially sweetened drinks may trick the brain into feeling hungry, which may in turn result in more calories being consumed,” Kathleen Page, MD, the study’s corresponding author, said in a separate statement.

Today’s lesson? Don’t believe every label you read.
 

Instagram vegetables and the triumph of peer pressure

You and your family are sitting down for dinner. You’ve taken the time to prepare a healthy, nutritious meal. Vegetables, rice, seafood – all the right things. But the children around you refuse to partake. What can you do? Why, show them a highly liked photo of broccoli on Instagram!

Teresa Burton/IMNG Medical Media

In reality, kids will probably never like to eat their vegetables, but according to a study published in Appetite, viewing highly liked images on social media can compel adults to eat theirs.

The investigators recruited a group of 169 adults aged 18-28 (average age, 21) and showed them a series of mock Instagram posts of all sorts of food, everything from Brussels sprouts to chocolate cake, as well as nonfood images to act as a baseline. The images had a varying amount of likes. After viewing the images, study participants were offered a snack buffet consisting of grapes and cookies.

The results were a triumph of peer pressure. Those who viewed highly liked images of nutritious foods ate a significantly larger proportion of grapes, compared with those who saw highly liked images of unhealthy food or nonfood.

The authors cautioned that more research is needed, but they said that they’re onto something in the eternal struggle of getting people to eat better. If Mikey liked it, maybe you should, too. Just as long as you don’t try to encourage the eating of peas. That is a dark road none should take, and no one should ever be subjected to that cursed food.
 

It’s nice to share … hypertension?

You may have heard that, over time, you begin to resemble your spouse. You may have also heard that, as time goes by, your pet might start to resemble you, but that is a story for another time.

sabelskaya/iStock/Getty Images Plus

A lot of the time, it’s human nature that people partner with someone who is similar to them in physical and environmental status. If you like to go jogging at 5 a.m., you might want a spouse who does the same. A study done using data from couples in Japan and the Netherlands found that couples who had the same lifestyle had similar levels of blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglycerides. They also had similar illnesses such as hypertension and diabetes.

It’s important to note that many of the couples were not very genetically similar but had similar lifestyles. Encourage your partner to have a healthier lifestyle, so you can live on for many years to come!

Novel food for thought

When you were growing up, your parents probably told you to brush your teeth before you went to bed, warned you not to run with the scissors or play with matches, and punished you whenever you used the neighbor children to play Schrödinger’s cat.

World Wildlife/StockSnap

They did those things for your own good, of course, and now the nation’s mother – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – is doing the same by warning us about novel outbreak–associated foods. As in, “Put down that novel outbreak–associated food! You don’t know where it’s been!”

Seriously, you don’t know where it’s been. CDC investigators identified 28 novel foods that were linked to 36 foodborne-disease outbreaks that occurred during 2007-2016, including moringa leaf (herb/spice), tempeh (grain), frog, sprouted nut butter, and skate.

The novel foods implicated in these outbreaks were more likely to be imported, compared with 14,216 outbreaks that occurred from 1973 to 2016, and about half didn’t require refrigeration. Two-thirds did not need to be cooked after purchase. Another thing your parents wouldn’t like: Some can’t be washed, like sheep milk, sugar cane, or the aforementioned nut butter.

We wanted to get a food expert to comment on these novel foods, but our editor said that the assistant manager of our local Burger King wasn’t expert enough, so we’ve commandeered someone else’s expert. Cynthia Sears, MD, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told Today.com all about the dangers of frogs: “Essentially all amphibians are contaminated, often with salmonella. Eating any amphibian that is not thoroughly cooked is a risk.”

Be sure to cook your amphibians before you eat them. Advice that your parents would be proud to share.
 

Dieters should stay away from diet drinks

When a drink is labeled “diet” many assume that the calorie-free beverage is the best choice. However, one of the largest studies to date on artificial sweeteners is out to set the record straight.

American Heart Association

Artificial sweeteners, or nonnutritive sweeteners (NNS), are used in most if not all diet products to give the illusion of sweetness without the caloric guilt. Some studies say they help with weight loss for that very reason, but others say they can contribute to weight gain. So which is it?

Researchers at the University of Southern California sought to add some clarity to the research already out there.

They looked at an even-gendered split of 74 participants who drank 300 mL of drinks sweetened with NNS, table sugar, or water. The researchers then used functional MRI to see how parts of the brain responsible for appetite and cravings responded to images of high-calorie foods. They also looked at glucose, insulin, and other metabolic hormone levels, as well as how much food the participants ate at their free buffet. (In the participants’ defense, who can say no to a free buffet?)

The researchers made some interesting observations:

• Women who drank the NNS drink ate more than did the table-sugar group, but all men ate the same.
• Images of those calorie-packed goodies increased cravings and appetite for obese men and women in the NNS group, compared with the table-sugar group.
• For all participants who drank the NNS drink, there was a decrease in the hormone that tells the body it’s full.

“By studying different groups we were able to show that females and people with obesity may be more sensitive to artificial sweeteners. For these groups, drinking artificially sweetened drinks may trick the brain into feeling hungry, which may in turn result in more calories being consumed,” Kathleen Page, MD, the study’s corresponding author, said in a separate statement.

Today’s lesson? Don’t believe every label you read.
 

Instagram vegetables and the triumph of peer pressure

You and your family are sitting down for dinner. You’ve taken the time to prepare a healthy, nutritious meal. Vegetables, rice, seafood – all the right things. But the children around you refuse to partake. What can you do? Why, show them a highly liked photo of broccoli on Instagram!

Teresa Burton/IMNG Medical Media

In reality, kids will probably never like to eat their vegetables, but according to a study published in Appetite, viewing highly liked images on social media can compel adults to eat theirs.

The investigators recruited a group of 169 adults aged 18-28 (average age, 21) and showed them a series of mock Instagram posts of all sorts of food, everything from Brussels sprouts to chocolate cake, as well as nonfood images to act as a baseline. The images had a varying amount of likes. After viewing the images, study participants were offered a snack buffet consisting of grapes and cookies.

The results were a triumph of peer pressure. Those who viewed highly liked images of nutritious foods ate a significantly larger proportion of grapes, compared with those who saw highly liked images of unhealthy food or nonfood.

The authors cautioned that more research is needed, but they said that they’re onto something in the eternal struggle of getting people to eat better. If Mikey liked it, maybe you should, too. Just as long as you don’t try to encourage the eating of peas. That is a dark road none should take, and no one should ever be subjected to that cursed food.
 

It’s nice to share … hypertension?

You may have heard that, over time, you begin to resemble your spouse. You may have also heard that, as time goes by, your pet might start to resemble you, but that is a story for another time.

sabelskaya/iStock/Getty Images Plus

A lot of the time, it’s human nature that people partner with someone who is similar to them in physical and environmental status. If you like to go jogging at 5 a.m., you might want a spouse who does the same. A study done using data from couples in Japan and the Netherlands found that couples who had the same lifestyle had similar levels of blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglycerides. They also had similar illnesses such as hypertension and diabetes.

It’s important to note that many of the couples were not very genetically similar but had similar lifestyles. Encourage your partner to have a healthier lifestyle, so you can live on for many years to come!

Novel food for thought

When you were growing up, your parents probably told you to brush your teeth before you went to bed, warned you not to run with the scissors or play with matches, and punished you whenever you used the neighbor children to play Schrödinger’s cat.

World Wildlife/StockSnap

They did those things for your own good, of course, and now the nation’s mother – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – is doing the same by warning us about novel outbreak–associated foods. As in, “Put down that novel outbreak–associated food! You don’t know where it’s been!”

Seriously, you don’t know where it’s been. CDC investigators identified 28 novel foods that were linked to 36 foodborne-disease outbreaks that occurred during 2007-2016, including moringa leaf (herb/spice), tempeh (grain), frog, sprouted nut butter, and skate.

The novel foods implicated in these outbreaks were more likely to be imported, compared with 14,216 outbreaks that occurred from 1973 to 2016, and about half didn’t require refrigeration. Two-thirds did not need to be cooked after purchase. Another thing your parents wouldn’t like: Some can’t be washed, like sheep milk, sugar cane, or the aforementioned nut butter.

We wanted to get a food expert to comment on these novel foods, but our editor said that the assistant manager of our local Burger King wasn’t expert enough, so we’ve commandeered someone else’s expert. Cynthia Sears, MD, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told Today.com all about the dangers of frogs: “Essentially all amphibians are contaminated, often with salmonella. Eating any amphibian that is not thoroughly cooked is a risk.”

Be sure to cook your amphibians before you eat them. Advice that your parents would be proud to share.
 

Dieters should stay away from diet drinks

When a drink is labeled “diet” many assume that the calorie-free beverage is the best choice. However, one of the largest studies to date on artificial sweeteners is out to set the record straight.

American Heart Association

Artificial sweeteners, or nonnutritive sweeteners (NNS), are used in most if not all diet products to give the illusion of sweetness without the caloric guilt. Some studies say they help with weight loss for that very reason, but others say they can contribute to weight gain. So which is it?

Researchers at the University of Southern California sought to add some clarity to the research already out there.

They looked at an even-gendered split of 74 participants who drank 300 mL of drinks sweetened with NNS, table sugar, or water. The researchers then used functional MRI to see how parts of the brain responsible for appetite and cravings responded to images of high-calorie foods. They also looked at glucose, insulin, and other metabolic hormone levels, as well as how much food the participants ate at their free buffet. (In the participants’ defense, who can say no to a free buffet?)

The researchers made some interesting observations:

• Women who drank the NNS drink ate more than did the table-sugar group, but all men ate the same.
• Images of those calorie-packed goodies increased cravings and appetite for obese men and women in the NNS group, compared with the table-sugar group.
• For all participants who drank the NNS drink, there was a decrease in the hormone that tells the body it’s full.

“By studying different groups we were able to show that females and people with obesity may be more sensitive to artificial sweeteners. For these groups, drinking artificially sweetened drinks may trick the brain into feeling hungry, which may in turn result in more calories being consumed,” Kathleen Page, MD, the study’s corresponding author, said in a separate statement.

Today’s lesson? Don’t believe every label you read.
 

Instagram vegetables and the triumph of peer pressure

You and your family are sitting down for dinner. You’ve taken the time to prepare a healthy, nutritious meal. Vegetables, rice, seafood – all the right things. But the children around you refuse to partake. What can you do? Why, show them a highly liked photo of broccoli on Instagram!

Teresa Burton/IMNG Medical Media

In reality, kids will probably never like to eat their vegetables, but according to a study published in Appetite, viewing highly liked images on social media can compel adults to eat theirs.

The investigators recruited a group of 169 adults aged 18-28 (average age, 21) and showed them a series of mock Instagram posts of all sorts of food, everything from Brussels sprouts to chocolate cake, as well as nonfood images to act as a baseline. The images had a varying amount of likes. After viewing the images, study participants were offered a snack buffet consisting of grapes and cookies.

The results were a triumph of peer pressure. Those who viewed highly liked images of nutritious foods ate a significantly larger proportion of grapes, compared with those who saw highly liked images of unhealthy food or nonfood.

The authors cautioned that more research is needed, but they said that they’re onto something in the eternal struggle of getting people to eat better. If Mikey liked it, maybe you should, too. Just as long as you don’t try to encourage the eating of peas. That is a dark road none should take, and no one should ever be subjected to that cursed food.
 

It’s nice to share … hypertension?

You may have heard that, over time, you begin to resemble your spouse. You may have also heard that, as time goes by, your pet might start to resemble you, but that is a story for another time.

sabelskaya/iStock/Getty Images Plus

A lot of the time, it’s human nature that people partner with someone who is similar to them in physical and environmental status. If you like to go jogging at 5 a.m., you might want a spouse who does the same. A study done using data from couples in Japan and the Netherlands found that couples who had the same lifestyle had similar levels of blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglycerides. They also had similar illnesses such as hypertension and diabetes.

It’s important to note that many of the couples were not very genetically similar but had similar lifestyles. Encourage your partner to have a healthier lifestyle, so you can live on for many years to come!

The use of patient portals that provide access to electronic health records has dramatically increased in the past several years, and patients whose health care practitioner encouraged them to use their online portal accessed them at a higher rate than those who were not encouraged to do so.

These were among the top-line results of a national survey of U.S. adults conducted by the National Institutes of Health from January 2020 to April 2020. Although the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in the middle of that period, a report on the survey by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT stated, “These findings largely reflect prepandemic rates of individuals being offered and subsequently using their online medical record, also known as a patient portal.”

But with more patient access can come additional work for physicians and other health care practitioners, ranging from an onslaught of patient communications to managing data sent to them by patients.

According to the report, 59% of individuals were offered access to their patient portal, and 38% accessed their record at least once in 2020. By comparison, in 2014, just 42% were offered access to their portal, and 25% used it. But these percentages hardly changed from 2019 to 2020.

The increase in the percentage of people who accessed portals reflects the fact that more people were offered access. In addition, there were signs of rising activity among portal users.

Among patients offered access to their patient portal, 64% accessed it at least once in 2020 – 11 percentage points more than in 2017. Twenty-seven percent of those who had access to a portal used it once or twice; 20% accessed it three to five times; and 18% used it six or more times. The latter two percentages were significantly higher than in 2017.

Of the respondents who were offered access to portals but didn’t use them, 69% said they didn’t access the portal because they preferred to speak with their health care practitioner directly. Sixty-three percent said they didn’t see a need to use their online medical record. This was similar to the percentage 3 years earlier. Other reasons included respondents’ concerns about the privacy/security of online medical records (24%), their lack of comfort with computers (20%), and their lack of Internet access (13%).
 

The pros and cons of patient portals, greater access

Among portal users who accessed their records through a mobile health app, 51% used the app to facilitate discussions with their health care practitioner in 2020, an 8–percentage point increase from 2017. Fifty-percent of the mobile health app users utilized it to make a decision about how to treat an illness or condition, up from 45% in 2017. And 71% of these individuals used their app to track progress on a health-related goal, just a bit more than in 2017.

Individuals who were encouraged by their health care practitioner to use their patient portal viewed clinical notes and exchanged secure messages with their practitioner at higher rates than those who had not been encouraged. This is not surprising, but it reflects an unintended result of patient portals that many physicians have found burdensome, especially during the pandemic: overflowing electronic in-boxes.

Robert Wachter, MD, chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, recently tweeted, “We’re seeing huge uptick in in-box messages for MDs during COVID – now seems like biggest driver of MD burnout. The fundamental problem: We turned on 24/7/365 access for patients (who of course like it) with no operational or business model to handle it. Crucial that we fix this.”

Steven Waldren, MD, vice president and chief medical informatics officer at the American Academy of Family Physicians, told this news organization that he agrees that this is a major challenge. “In-box management is a burden on physicians and practices,” he said. “However, it can be done better, either through a team in-box or through better use of technology.”

The team in-box he refers to is a mechanism for triaging patient messages. For example, a triage nurse can look at the messages and decide which ones can be handled by staff and which ones the doctor needs to see. Or physicians and front office staff can see the messages at the same time; a nurse can triage some messages according to protocols, and the physician can respond to any message, depending on what he or she knows about the patient.

Technology can also be enlisted in the effort, he suggested, perhaps by automating the triaging of messages such as prescription refill requests or using artificial intelligence to sort messages by content.

Making patient records portable

Nearly 40% of portal users accessed it using a smartphone app (17%) or with both their smartphone app and their computer (22%). Sixty-one percent of users relied exclusively on computers to access their portals.

About a third of patient portal users downloaded their online medical records in 2020. This proportion has nearly doubled from 17% since 2017, the ONC report noted.

Although the survey didn’t ask about multiple downloads, it appears that most people had to download their records separately from the patient portal of each practitioner who cared for them. Although the Apple Health app allows people to download records to their iPhones from multiple portals using a standard application programming interface, the ONC report says that only 5% of respondents transmitted their records to a service or app, up slightly from 3% in 2017.

Dr. Waldren hopes most patients will have the ability to download and integrate records from multiple practitioners in a few years, but he wouldn’t bet on it.

“A fair amount of work needs to be done on the business side and on figuring out how the data get connected together,” he said. “And there are still privacy concerns with apps.”

Overall, 21% of portal users transmitted their data to at least one outside party in 2020, compared with 14% in 2017. Seventeen percent of them sent their records to another health care practitioner, up from 10% in 2017. Five percent of the users transmitted their records to a caregiver, slightly more than in 2017.

Managing data is a challenge

Asked how physicians feel about portal users adding information to their record or correcting inaccurate information, Dr. Waldren says, “Doctors are already comfortable with patient-generated data. The challenge is managing it. If the patient provides data that’s not easy to put in the EHR, that’s going to add work, and they don’t want to see 100 blood pressure readings.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find a doctor who doesn’t welcome additional information about the patient’s health, but it can be onerous and can take time to enter the data,” Dr. Waldren said.

Overall, he said, “Giving patients the ability to take more ownership of their health and participate in their own care is good and can help us move forward. How this will be integrated into patient care is another question.”

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

The use of patient portals that provide access to electronic health records has dramatically increased in the past several years, and patients whose health care practitioner encouraged them to use their online portal accessed them at a higher rate than those who were not encouraged to do so.

These were among the top-line results of a national survey of U.S. adults conducted by the National Institutes of Health from January 2020 to April 2020. Although the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in the middle of that period, a report on the survey by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT stated, “These findings largely reflect prepandemic rates of individuals being offered and subsequently using their online medical record, also known as a patient portal.”

But with more patient access can come additional work for physicians and other health care practitioners, ranging from an onslaught of patient communications to managing data sent to them by patients.

According to the report, 59% of individuals were offered access to their patient portal, and 38% accessed their record at least once in 2020. By comparison, in 2014, just 42% were offered access to their portal, and 25% used it. But these percentages hardly changed from 2019 to 2020.

The increase in the percentage of people who accessed portals reflects the fact that more people were offered access. In addition, there were signs of rising activity among portal users.

Among patients offered access to their patient portal, 64% accessed it at least once in 2020 – 11 percentage points more than in 2017. Twenty-seven percent of those who had access to a portal used it once or twice; 20% accessed it three to five times; and 18% used it six or more times. The latter two percentages were significantly higher than in 2017.

Of the respondents who were offered access to portals but didn’t use them, 69% said they didn’t access the portal because they preferred to speak with their health care practitioner directly. Sixty-three percent said they didn’t see a need to use their online medical record. This was similar to the percentage 3 years earlier. Other reasons included respondents’ concerns about the privacy/security of online medical records (24%), their lack of comfort with computers (20%), and their lack of Internet access (13%).
 

The pros and cons of patient portals, greater access

Among portal users who accessed their records through a mobile health app, 51% used the app to facilitate discussions with their health care practitioner in 2020, an 8–percentage point increase from 2017. Fifty-percent of the mobile health app users utilized it to make a decision about how to treat an illness or condition, up from 45% in 2017. And 71% of these individuals used their app to track progress on a health-related goal, just a bit more than in 2017.

Individuals who were encouraged by their health care practitioner to use their patient portal viewed clinical notes and exchanged secure messages with their practitioner at higher rates than those who had not been encouraged. This is not surprising, but it reflects an unintended result of patient portals that many physicians have found burdensome, especially during the pandemic: overflowing electronic in-boxes.

Robert Wachter, MD, chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, recently tweeted, “We’re seeing huge uptick in in-box messages for MDs during COVID – now seems like biggest driver of MD burnout. The fundamental problem: We turned on 24/7/365 access for patients (who of course like it) with no operational or business model to handle it. Crucial that we fix this.”

Steven Waldren, MD, vice president and chief medical informatics officer at the American Academy of Family Physicians, told this news organization that he agrees that this is a major challenge. “In-box management is a burden on physicians and practices,” he said. “However, it can be done better, either through a team in-box or through better use of technology.”

The team in-box he refers to is a mechanism for triaging patient messages. For example, a triage nurse can look at the messages and decide which ones can be handled by staff and which ones the doctor needs to see. Or physicians and front office staff can see the messages at the same time; a nurse can triage some messages according to protocols, and the physician can respond to any message, depending on what he or she knows about the patient.

Technology can also be enlisted in the effort, he suggested, perhaps by automating the triaging of messages such as prescription refill requests or using artificial intelligence to sort messages by content.

Making patient records portable

Nearly 40% of portal users accessed it using a smartphone app (17%) or with both their smartphone app and their computer (22%). Sixty-one percent of users relied exclusively on computers to access their portals.

About a third of patient portal users downloaded their online medical records in 2020. This proportion has nearly doubled from 17% since 2017, the ONC report noted.

Although the survey didn’t ask about multiple downloads, it appears that most people had to download their records separately from the patient portal of each practitioner who cared for them. Although the Apple Health app allows people to download records to their iPhones from multiple portals using a standard application programming interface, the ONC report says that only 5% of respondents transmitted their records to a service or app, up slightly from 3% in 2017.

Dr. Waldren hopes most patients will have the ability to download and integrate records from multiple practitioners in a few years, but he wouldn’t bet on it.

“A fair amount of work needs to be done on the business side and on figuring out how the data get connected together,” he said. “And there are still privacy concerns with apps.”

Overall, 21% of portal users transmitted their data to at least one outside party in 2020, compared with 14% in 2017. Seventeen percent of them sent their records to another health care practitioner, up from 10% in 2017. Five percent of the users transmitted their records to a caregiver, slightly more than in 2017.

Managing data is a challenge

Asked how physicians feel about portal users adding information to their record or correcting inaccurate information, Dr. Waldren says, “Doctors are already comfortable with patient-generated data. The challenge is managing it. If the patient provides data that’s not easy to put in the EHR, that’s going to add work, and they don’t want to see 100 blood pressure readings.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find a doctor who doesn’t welcome additional information about the patient’s health, but it can be onerous and can take time to enter the data,” Dr. Waldren said.

Overall, he said, “Giving patients the ability to take more ownership of their health and participate in their own care is good and can help us move forward. How this will be integrated into patient care is another question.”

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

The use of patient portals that provide access to electronic health records has dramatically increased in the past several years, and patients whose health care practitioner encouraged them to use their online portal accessed them at a higher rate than those who were not encouraged to do so.

These were among the top-line results of a national survey of U.S. adults conducted by the National Institutes of Health from January 2020 to April 2020. Although the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in the middle of that period, a report on the survey by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT stated, “These findings largely reflect prepandemic rates of individuals being offered and subsequently using their online medical record, also known as a patient portal.”

But with more patient access can come additional work for physicians and other health care practitioners, ranging from an onslaught of patient communications to managing data sent to them by patients.

According to the report, 59% of individuals were offered access to their patient portal, and 38% accessed their record at least once in 2020. By comparison, in 2014, just 42% were offered access to their portal, and 25% used it. But these percentages hardly changed from 2019 to 2020.

The increase in the percentage of people who accessed portals reflects the fact that more people were offered access. In addition, there were signs of rising activity among portal users.

Among patients offered access to their patient portal, 64% accessed it at least once in 2020 – 11 percentage points more than in 2017. Twenty-seven percent of those who had access to a portal used it once or twice; 20% accessed it three to five times; and 18% used it six or more times. The latter two percentages were significantly higher than in 2017.

Of the respondents who were offered access to portals but didn’t use them, 69% said they didn’t access the portal because they preferred to speak with their health care practitioner directly. Sixty-three percent said they didn’t see a need to use their online medical record. This was similar to the percentage 3 years earlier. Other reasons included respondents’ concerns about the privacy/security of online medical records (24%), their lack of comfort with computers (20%), and their lack of Internet access (13%).
 

The pros and cons of patient portals, greater access

Among portal users who accessed their records through a mobile health app, 51% used the app to facilitate discussions with their health care practitioner in 2020, an 8–percentage point increase from 2017. Fifty-percent of the mobile health app users utilized it to make a decision about how to treat an illness or condition, up from 45% in 2017. And 71% of these individuals used their app to track progress on a health-related goal, just a bit more than in 2017.

Individuals who were encouraged by their health care practitioner to use their patient portal viewed clinical notes and exchanged secure messages with their practitioner at higher rates than those who had not been encouraged. This is not surprising, but it reflects an unintended result of patient portals that many physicians have found burdensome, especially during the pandemic: overflowing electronic in-boxes.

Robert Wachter, MD, chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, recently tweeted, “We’re seeing huge uptick in in-box messages for MDs during COVID – now seems like biggest driver of MD burnout. The fundamental problem: We turned on 24/7/365 access for patients (who of course like it) with no operational or business model to handle it. Crucial that we fix this.”

Steven Waldren, MD, vice president and chief medical informatics officer at the American Academy of Family Physicians, told this news organization that he agrees that this is a major challenge. “In-box management is a burden on physicians and practices,” he said. “However, it can be done better, either through a team in-box or through better use of technology.”

The team in-box he refers to is a mechanism for triaging patient messages. For example, a triage nurse can look at the messages and decide which ones can be handled by staff and which ones the doctor needs to see. Or physicians and front office staff can see the messages at the same time; a nurse can triage some messages according to protocols, and the physician can respond to any message, depending on what he or she knows about the patient.

Technology can also be enlisted in the effort, he suggested, perhaps by automating the triaging of messages such as prescription refill requests or using artificial intelligence to sort messages by content.

Making patient records portable

Nearly 40% of portal users accessed it using a smartphone app (17%) or with both their smartphone app and their computer (22%). Sixty-one percent of users relied exclusively on computers to access their portals.

About a third of patient portal users downloaded their online medical records in 2020. This proportion has nearly doubled from 17% since 2017, the ONC report noted.

Although the survey didn’t ask about multiple downloads, it appears that most people had to download their records separately from the patient portal of each practitioner who cared for them. Although the Apple Health app allows people to download records to their iPhones from multiple portals using a standard application programming interface, the ONC report says that only 5% of respondents transmitted their records to a service or app, up slightly from 3% in 2017.

Dr. Waldren hopes most patients will have the ability to download and integrate records from multiple practitioners in a few years, but he wouldn’t bet on it.

“A fair amount of work needs to be done on the business side and on figuring out how the data get connected together,” he said. “And there are still privacy concerns with apps.”

Overall, 21% of portal users transmitted their data to at least one outside party in 2020, compared with 14% in 2017. Seventeen percent of them sent their records to another health care practitioner, up from 10% in 2017. Five percent of the users transmitted their records to a caregiver, slightly more than in 2017.

Managing data is a challenge

Asked how physicians feel about portal users adding information to their record or correcting inaccurate information, Dr. Waldren says, “Doctors are already comfortable with patient-generated data. The challenge is managing it. If the patient provides data that’s not easy to put in the EHR, that’s going to add work, and they don’t want to see 100 blood pressure readings.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find a doctor who doesn’t welcome additional information about the patient’s health, but it can be onerous and can take time to enter the data,” Dr. Waldren said.

Overall, he said, “Giving patients the ability to take more ownership of their health and participate in their own care is good and can help us move forward. How this will be integrated into patient care is another question.”

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Avanos medical to pay $22 million to resolve criminal charge for fraudulent misbranding of PPE

A U.S.-based multinational medical device corporation will pay more than $22 million to resolve a criminal charge regarding fraudulent misbranding of their surgical gowns.

Avanos Medical Inc, which as its U.S. headquarters in Alpharetta, Georgia, is charged with one count of introducing misbranded surgical gowns into interstate commerce with the intent to defraud and mislead.

According to the Department of Justice, the company knowingly falsely labeled its MicroCool surgical gowns as providing AAMI Level 4 protection (the highest level) against fluid and virus penetration. Under the standards set by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI), the highest protection level for surgical gowns is reserved for gowns intended to be used in surgeries and other high-risk medical procedures on patients suspected of having infectious diseases.

Avanos admitted to selling hundreds of thousands of MicroCool gowns that were falsely labeled as AAMI Level 4 between late 2014 and early 2015, as well as directly lying to customers about the gowns’ protective capacities. In total, Avanos sold almost $9 million of misbranded MicroCool gowns.

“The last thing health care workers should have to worry about is whether their personal protective equipment lives up to manufacturers’ claims,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Prerak Shah for the Northern District of Texas. “Misbranded PPE can pose serious risks to medical professionals and patients alike.”
 

Company pays $38.75 million to settle allegations of knowingly selling defective devices 

Medical device manufacturers Alere and Alere San Diego (collectively, Alere) have agreed to pay almost $39 million to resolve allegations that they violated the False Claims Act by billing, and causing others to bill, the Medicare program for defective rapid point-of-care testing devices. 

From 2008 to 2016, the Department of Justice alleges, Alere knowingly sold defective INRatio blood coagulation monitors used by Medicare beneficiaries who were taking anticoagulants. The software algorithms in the monitors contained a material defect, which Alere had found in their research, to cause inaccurate readings. Blood coagulation monitoring is essential for the safety of these patients, enabling them to maintain a safe dosage of their medications. Taking too much of an anticoagulant can cause major bleeding, while taking too little can cause blood clots that lead to strokes. 

While Alere was aware that these devices were linked to over a dozen deaths and hundreds of injuries, the company continued to conceal the defect and billed Medicare for the devices.

In 2016, the product was taken off the market at the request of the FDA.
 

Mass. doctor, wife charged in international money laundering, fraud scheme

Massachusetts psychiatrist Rahim Shafa, MD, and his wife and office manager, Nahid Tormosi Shafa, are charged in connection to an international money laundering scheme involving importing illegal and misbranded drugs. 

Through Shafa’s company, Novel Psychopharmacology, the two allegedly filed false and fraudulent Medicare reimbursement claims from 2016-2019, then deposited the money in their bank accounts, according to federal officials. From 2008-2018, the couple also engaged in an international money laundering scheme to purchase naltrexone pellet implants, disulfiram pellet implants, and injections from Hong Kong that were not approved by the FDA. According to officials, they falsified shipping documents, disguising the naltrexone pellet implants as “plastic beads in plastic tubes” to receive the drugs. They then offered to sell these drugs to patients of Novel Psychopharmacology. 

Rahim Shafa was indicted on conspiracies of international money laundering, health care fraud, and defrauding the United States, as well as illegally importing merchandise and purposely delivering misbranded drugs. His wife was indicted on one count each of health care fraud conspiracy and international money laundering conspiracy.
 

Jury convicts medical equipment company owners of $27 million fraud

A federal jury in Texas convicted the owners of two durable medical equipment (DME) companies linked to a scheme to defraud Medicare.

Leah Hagen, 49, and Michael Hagen, 54, were convicted of one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and to pay and receive health care kickbacks and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. The defendants owned and operated Metro DME Supply and Ortho Pain Solutions. 

Ms. Hagen and Mr. Hagen paid a fixed rate per DME item in exchange for prescriptions and paperwork completed by telemedicine doctors that were used to submit false claims to Medicare, which totaled about $59 million. They were paid $27 million, and wired millions to their personal bank accounts. The defendants paid illegal bribes and kickbacks and wired money to their co-conspirator’s call center in the Philippines that provided signed doctor’s orders for orthotic braces. 

At trial, evidence showed emails between Leah and Michael Hagen and their co-conspirators outlining a per-product pricing structure for orthotic braces, but not disclosing their agreement as one for marketing and other services.

At sentencing, the Hagens each face a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Avanos medical to pay $22 million to resolve criminal charge for fraudulent misbranding of PPE

A U.S.-based multinational medical device corporation will pay more than $22 million to resolve a criminal charge regarding fraudulent misbranding of their surgical gowns.

Avanos Medical Inc, which as its U.S. headquarters in Alpharetta, Georgia, is charged with one count of introducing misbranded surgical gowns into interstate commerce with the intent to defraud and mislead.

According to the Department of Justice, the company knowingly falsely labeled its MicroCool surgical gowns as providing AAMI Level 4 protection (the highest level) against fluid and virus penetration. Under the standards set by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI), the highest protection level for surgical gowns is reserved for gowns intended to be used in surgeries and other high-risk medical procedures on patients suspected of having infectious diseases.

Avanos admitted to selling hundreds of thousands of MicroCool gowns that were falsely labeled as AAMI Level 4 between late 2014 and early 2015, as well as directly lying to customers about the gowns’ protective capacities. In total, Avanos sold almost $9 million of misbranded MicroCool gowns.

“The last thing health care workers should have to worry about is whether their personal protective equipment lives up to manufacturers’ claims,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Prerak Shah for the Northern District of Texas. “Misbranded PPE can pose serious risks to medical professionals and patients alike.”
 

Company pays $38.75 million to settle allegations of knowingly selling defective devices 

Medical device manufacturers Alere and Alere San Diego (collectively, Alere) have agreed to pay almost $39 million to resolve allegations that they violated the False Claims Act by billing, and causing others to bill, the Medicare program for defective rapid point-of-care testing devices. 

From 2008 to 2016, the Department of Justice alleges, Alere knowingly sold defective INRatio blood coagulation monitors used by Medicare beneficiaries who were taking anticoagulants. The software algorithms in the monitors contained a material defect, which Alere had found in their research, to cause inaccurate readings. Blood coagulation monitoring is essential for the safety of these patients, enabling them to maintain a safe dosage of their medications. Taking too much of an anticoagulant can cause major bleeding, while taking too little can cause blood clots that lead to strokes. 

While Alere was aware that these devices were linked to over a dozen deaths and hundreds of injuries, the company continued to conceal the defect and billed Medicare for the devices.

In 2016, the product was taken off the market at the request of the FDA.
 

Mass. doctor, wife charged in international money laundering, fraud scheme

Massachusetts psychiatrist Rahim Shafa, MD, and his wife and office manager, Nahid Tormosi Shafa, are charged in connection to an international money laundering scheme involving importing illegal and misbranded drugs. 

Through Shafa’s company, Novel Psychopharmacology, the two allegedly filed false and fraudulent Medicare reimbursement claims from 2016-2019, then deposited the money in their bank accounts, according to federal officials. From 2008-2018, the couple also engaged in an international money laundering scheme to purchase naltrexone pellet implants, disulfiram pellet implants, and injections from Hong Kong that were not approved by the FDA. According to officials, they falsified shipping documents, disguising the naltrexone pellet implants as “plastic beads in plastic tubes” to receive the drugs. They then offered to sell these drugs to patients of Novel Psychopharmacology. 

Rahim Shafa was indicted on conspiracies of international money laundering, health care fraud, and defrauding the United States, as well as illegally importing merchandise and purposely delivering misbranded drugs. His wife was indicted on one count each of health care fraud conspiracy and international money laundering conspiracy.
 

Jury convicts medical equipment company owners of $27 million fraud

A federal jury in Texas convicted the owners of two durable medical equipment (DME) companies linked to a scheme to defraud Medicare.

Leah Hagen, 49, and Michael Hagen, 54, were convicted of one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and to pay and receive health care kickbacks and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. The defendants owned and operated Metro DME Supply and Ortho Pain Solutions. 

Ms. Hagen and Mr. Hagen paid a fixed rate per DME item in exchange for prescriptions and paperwork completed by telemedicine doctors that were used to submit false claims to Medicare, which totaled about $59 million. They were paid $27 million, and wired millions to their personal bank accounts. The defendants paid illegal bribes and kickbacks and wired money to their co-conspirator’s call center in the Philippines that provided signed doctor’s orders for orthotic braces. 

At trial, evidence showed emails between Leah and Michael Hagen and their co-conspirators outlining a per-product pricing structure for orthotic braces, but not disclosing their agreement as one for marketing and other services.

At sentencing, the Hagens each face a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Avanos medical to pay $22 million to resolve criminal charge for fraudulent misbranding of PPE

A U.S.-based multinational medical device corporation will pay more than $22 million to resolve a criminal charge regarding fraudulent misbranding of their surgical gowns.

Avanos Medical Inc, which as its U.S. headquarters in Alpharetta, Georgia, is charged with one count of introducing misbranded surgical gowns into interstate commerce with the intent to defraud and mislead.

According to the Department of Justice, the company knowingly falsely labeled its MicroCool surgical gowns as providing AAMI Level 4 protection (the highest level) against fluid and virus penetration. Under the standards set by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI), the highest protection level for surgical gowns is reserved for gowns intended to be used in surgeries and other high-risk medical procedures on patients suspected of having infectious diseases.

Avanos admitted to selling hundreds of thousands of MicroCool gowns that were falsely labeled as AAMI Level 4 between late 2014 and early 2015, as well as directly lying to customers about the gowns’ protective capacities. In total, Avanos sold almost $9 million of misbranded MicroCool gowns.

“The last thing health care workers should have to worry about is whether their personal protective equipment lives up to manufacturers’ claims,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Prerak Shah for the Northern District of Texas. “Misbranded PPE can pose serious risks to medical professionals and patients alike.”
 

Company pays $38.75 million to settle allegations of knowingly selling defective devices 

Medical device manufacturers Alere and Alere San Diego (collectively, Alere) have agreed to pay almost $39 million to resolve allegations that they violated the False Claims Act by billing, and causing others to bill, the Medicare program for defective rapid point-of-care testing devices. 

From 2008 to 2016, the Department of Justice alleges, Alere knowingly sold defective INRatio blood coagulation monitors used by Medicare beneficiaries who were taking anticoagulants. The software algorithms in the monitors contained a material defect, which Alere had found in their research, to cause inaccurate readings. Blood coagulation monitoring is essential for the safety of these patients, enabling them to maintain a safe dosage of their medications. Taking too much of an anticoagulant can cause major bleeding, while taking too little can cause blood clots that lead to strokes. 

While Alere was aware that these devices were linked to over a dozen deaths and hundreds of injuries, the company continued to conceal the defect and billed Medicare for the devices.

In 2016, the product was taken off the market at the request of the FDA.
 

Mass. doctor, wife charged in international money laundering, fraud scheme

Massachusetts psychiatrist Rahim Shafa, MD, and his wife and office manager, Nahid Tormosi Shafa, are charged in connection to an international money laundering scheme involving importing illegal and misbranded drugs. 

Through Shafa’s company, Novel Psychopharmacology, the two allegedly filed false and fraudulent Medicare reimbursement claims from 2016-2019, then deposited the money in their bank accounts, according to federal officials. From 2008-2018, the couple also engaged in an international money laundering scheme to purchase naltrexone pellet implants, disulfiram pellet implants, and injections from Hong Kong that were not approved by the FDA. According to officials, they falsified shipping documents, disguising the naltrexone pellet implants as “plastic beads in plastic tubes” to receive the drugs. They then offered to sell these drugs to patients of Novel Psychopharmacology. 

Rahim Shafa was indicted on conspiracies of international money laundering, health care fraud, and defrauding the United States, as well as illegally importing merchandise and purposely delivering misbranded drugs. His wife was indicted on one count each of health care fraud conspiracy and international money laundering conspiracy.
 

Jury convicts medical equipment company owners of $27 million fraud

A federal jury in Texas convicted the owners of two durable medical equipment (DME) companies linked to a scheme to defraud Medicare.

Leah Hagen, 49, and Michael Hagen, 54, were convicted of one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and to pay and receive health care kickbacks and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. The defendants owned and operated Metro DME Supply and Ortho Pain Solutions. 

Ms. Hagen and Mr. Hagen paid a fixed rate per DME item in exchange for prescriptions and paperwork completed by telemedicine doctors that were used to submit false claims to Medicare, which totaled about $59 million. They were paid $27 million, and wired millions to their personal bank accounts. The defendants paid illegal bribes and kickbacks and wired money to their co-conspirator’s call center in the Philippines that provided signed doctor’s orders for orthotic braces. 

At trial, evidence showed emails between Leah and Michael Hagen and their co-conspirators outlining a per-product pricing structure for orthotic braces, but not disclosing their agreement as one for marketing and other services.

At sentencing, the Hagens each face a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Weekly COVID-19 cases in children dropped again, but the count remained above 200,000 for the fifth consecutive week, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association.

Over that 5-week span since the end of August, in fact, the United States has added over 1.13 million new cases, or just under 20% of all cases (5.7 million) in children during the entire pandemic, based on the data in the AAP/CHA joint weekly report on COVID in children.

In the most recent week, Sept. 17-23, there were almost 207,000 new cases of COVID-19 in children, which represented 26.7% of all cases reported in the 46 states that are currently posting data by age on their COVID dashboards, the AAP and CHA said. (New York has never reported such data by age, and Alabama, Nebraska, and Texas have not updated their websites since July 29, June 24, and Aug. 26, respectively.)

The decline in new vaccinations among children, however, began before the summer surge in new cases hit its peak – 251,781 during the week of Aug. 27 to Sept. 2 – and has continued for 7 straight weeks in children aged 12-17 years, based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There were about 172,000 COVID vaccine initiations in children aged 12-17 for the week of Sept. 21-27, the lowest number since April, before it was approved for use in 12- to 15-year-olds. That figure is down by almost a third from the previous week and by more than two-thirds since early August, just before the decline in vaccinations began, according to the CDC’s COVID Data Tracker.

The cumulative vaccine situation looks like this: Just over 13 million children under age 18 years have received at least one dose as of Sept. 27, and almost 10.6 million are fully vaccinated. By age group, 53.9% of 12- to 15-year-olds and 61.6% of 16- to 17-year-olds have received at least one dose, with corresponding figures of 43.3% and 51.3% for full vaccination, the CDC said.

COVID-related hospital admissions also continue to fall after peaking at 0.51 children aged 0-17 per 100,000 population on Sept. 4. The admission rate was down to 0.45 per 100,000 as of Sept. 17, and the latest 7-day average (Sept. 19-25) was 258 admissions, compared with a peak of 371 for the week of Aug. 29 to Sept. 4, the CDC reported.

“Although we have seen slight improvements in COVID-19 volumes in the past week, we are at the beginning of an anticipated increase in” multi-inflammatory syndrome in children, Margaret Rush, MD, president of Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., said at a recent hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Oversight subcommittee. That increase would be expected to produce “a secondary wave of seriously ill children 3-6 weeks after acute infection peaks in the community,” the American Hospital Association said.

Meanwhile, Dr. Rush noted, there are signs that seasonal viruses are coming into play. “With the emergence of the Delta variant, we’ve experienced a steep increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations among children on top of an early surge of [respiratory syncytial virus], a serious respiratory illness we usually see in the winter months,” she said in a prepared statement before her testimony.

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Weekly COVID-19 cases in children dropped again, but the count remained above 200,000 for the fifth consecutive week, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association.

Over that 5-week span since the end of August, in fact, the United States has added over 1.13 million new cases, or just under 20% of all cases (5.7 million) in children during the entire pandemic, based on the data in the AAP/CHA joint weekly report on COVID in children.

In the most recent week, Sept. 17-23, there were almost 207,000 new cases of COVID-19 in children, which represented 26.7% of all cases reported in the 46 states that are currently posting data by age on their COVID dashboards, the AAP and CHA said. (New York has never reported such data by age, and Alabama, Nebraska, and Texas have not updated their websites since July 29, June 24, and Aug. 26, respectively.)

The decline in new vaccinations among children, however, began before the summer surge in new cases hit its peak – 251,781 during the week of Aug. 27 to Sept. 2 – and has continued for 7 straight weeks in children aged 12-17 years, based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There were about 172,000 COVID vaccine initiations in children aged 12-17 for the week of Sept. 21-27, the lowest number since April, before it was approved for use in 12- to 15-year-olds. That figure is down by almost a third from the previous week and by more than two-thirds since early August, just before the decline in vaccinations began, according to the CDC’s COVID Data Tracker.

The cumulative vaccine situation looks like this: Just over 13 million children under age 18 years have received at least one dose as of Sept. 27, and almost 10.6 million are fully vaccinated. By age group, 53.9% of 12- to 15-year-olds and 61.6% of 16- to 17-year-olds have received at least one dose, with corresponding figures of 43.3% and 51.3% for full vaccination, the CDC said.

COVID-related hospital admissions also continue to fall after peaking at 0.51 children aged 0-17 per 100,000 population on Sept. 4. The admission rate was down to 0.45 per 100,000 as of Sept. 17, and the latest 7-day average (Sept. 19-25) was 258 admissions, compared with a peak of 371 for the week of Aug. 29 to Sept. 4, the CDC reported.

“Although we have seen slight improvements in COVID-19 volumes in the past week, we are at the beginning of an anticipated increase in” multi-inflammatory syndrome in children, Margaret Rush, MD, president of Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., said at a recent hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Oversight subcommittee. That increase would be expected to produce “a secondary wave of seriously ill children 3-6 weeks after acute infection peaks in the community,” the American Hospital Association said.

Meanwhile, Dr. Rush noted, there are signs that seasonal viruses are coming into play. “With the emergence of the Delta variant, we’ve experienced a steep increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations among children on top of an early surge of [respiratory syncytial virus], a serious respiratory illness we usually see in the winter months,” she said in a prepared statement before her testimony.

[email protected]

Weekly COVID-19 cases in children dropped again, but the count remained above 200,000 for the fifth consecutive week, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association.

Over that 5-week span since the end of August, in fact, the United States has added over 1.13 million new cases, or just under 20% of all cases (5.7 million) in children during the entire pandemic, based on the data in the AAP/CHA joint weekly report on COVID in children.

In the most recent week, Sept. 17-23, there were almost 207,000 new cases of COVID-19 in children, which represented 26.7% of all cases reported in the 46 states that are currently posting data by age on their COVID dashboards, the AAP and CHA said. (New York has never reported such data by age, and Alabama, Nebraska, and Texas have not updated their websites since July 29, June 24, and Aug. 26, respectively.)

The decline in new vaccinations among children, however, began before the summer surge in new cases hit its peak – 251,781 during the week of Aug. 27 to Sept. 2 – and has continued for 7 straight weeks in children aged 12-17 years, based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There were about 172,000 COVID vaccine initiations in children aged 12-17 for the week of Sept. 21-27, the lowest number since April, before it was approved for use in 12- to 15-year-olds. That figure is down by almost a third from the previous week and by more than two-thirds since early August, just before the decline in vaccinations began, according to the CDC’s COVID Data Tracker.

The cumulative vaccine situation looks like this: Just over 13 million children under age 18 years have received at least one dose as of Sept. 27, and almost 10.6 million are fully vaccinated. By age group, 53.9% of 12- to 15-year-olds and 61.6% of 16- to 17-year-olds have received at least one dose, with corresponding figures of 43.3% and 51.3% for full vaccination, the CDC said.

COVID-related hospital admissions also continue to fall after peaking at 0.51 children aged 0-17 per 100,000 population on Sept. 4. The admission rate was down to 0.45 per 100,000 as of Sept. 17, and the latest 7-day average (Sept. 19-25) was 258 admissions, compared with a peak of 371 for the week of Aug. 29 to Sept. 4, the CDC reported.

“Although we have seen slight improvements in COVID-19 volumes in the past week, we are at the beginning of an anticipated increase in” multi-inflammatory syndrome in children, Margaret Rush, MD, president of Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., said at a recent hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Oversight subcommittee. That increase would be expected to produce “a secondary wave of seriously ill children 3-6 weeks after acute infection peaks in the community,” the American Hospital Association said.

Meanwhile, Dr. Rush noted, there are signs that seasonal viruses are coming into play. “With the emergence of the Delta variant, we’ve experienced a steep increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations among children on top of an early surge of [respiratory syncytial virus], a serious respiratory illness we usually see in the winter months,” she said in a prepared statement before her testimony.

[email protected]